


Ghosts of You

by dirtylittlegreasemonkey



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Reunion Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:01:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25937833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtylittlegreasemonkey/pseuds/dirtylittlegreasemonkey
Summary: Reunion fic. In the run up to Christmas 2037, Aaron thinks he sees a ghost, his heart stops to see a grown-up Seb. Robert's been out of prison for years, but hasn't been in touch, cutting contact with everyone. As Aaron battles memories of the past and the way his life has been since losing Robert to prison, he has decision on his hands - does he walk away from his old wounds, or does he make contact with the man he can't forget?
Relationships: Aaron Dingle/Robert Sugden
Comments: 74
Kudos: 280





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been promising this fic for a while and as it's getting far too long to be one fic, I've decided to split into chapters and post one a week, on Sundays. I hope you enjoy - and if you do, a comment would be lovely!

It’s December. Fucking freezing. Gritty rain turning into ice as it falls onto his skin. Aaron’s in Leeds, last minute Christmas shopping because, well, doing it with plenty of time has never been his thing. There’s always been other people doing it for him and now, now it’s just him to make those decisions. The sting of those kinds of thoughts have been muted over time. It’s been four months since he and Cam had called it quits. Since Cam had stood up from the table, pressed his fingers into the bridge of his nose and said he couldn’t fucking do this anymore.

“You’re a 45-year-old man,” Cam said, already half out the door, coat in hand. “Stop living like you haven’t made your mind up about me yet.”

And then he was gone.

Aaron lets the posters in the window for 20% off, and the reindeer lights blur in the rain. There’s something about Christmas and its imposing cheer that sends him back eighteen years, to a loneliness unconquerable, to a time where he couldn’t bear to see time tick over to a brand-new year. Maybe Cam was right.

There’s a coffee shop ahead on the pedestrianised road, casting an amber glow onto the pavement even though the rest of the street has that three o’clock winter gloom, dark pressing in. And there, wiping down one of the outside tables, Aaron sees a ghost. His feet slow and he watches, eyes passing over the lad like ticking criteria off a list. The boy, and that’s what anyone under 35 has become to him now, has a beige staff apron tied around his slim waist, a black shirt rolled up to the elbows. But of course it’s the hair he notices, a shock of blond, styled in whatever is in fashion these days (Aaron can’t say he notices these things after losing his hair) a smattering of freckles, pale skin, a look of concentration as he scoots dirty coffee cups onto a tray that is so Robert, Aaron’s heart stops.

He presses his hand to the tight-part of his chest and staggers to the left of the pavement, catching his breath when he collapses against a set-back doorway of a closed bank so that even if Seb looked up from his work, Aaron would be hidden.

Aaron watches him, crawls back into that agonising, forbidden part of his brain that used to give him images of a future he was robbed of. Snapshots of a different life. Aaron breathes in and out, a flood of therapy training coming back to him, all those hours spent in a cold room. He watches Seb lean towards a seated trio of friends, smile and ask them a question. That smile feels like a bullet.

Robert’s been out of prison four years now. Although for all Aaron knows he could still be there, serving extra time, he could be dead, out of prison, married with kids, married with a dog, ill and alone, in another country.

He may as well be on another planet. Aaron’s heard nothing. He was with Wes on the year of Robert’s release, they’d just moved house, had a patio laid like some middle class, middle-aged straight couple. Robert Sugden felt like a world away. And then Aaron found himself awake at night, watching his phone roll over to midnight and he knew, had the clatter of it in his chest. He had to pinch himself to stop him going to the bathroom and cutting. Even though he hadn’t done that kind of thing for years.

Aaron had moved away from the village, from Vic, from the Sugdens, from everything that despite his best fight, lived and breathed with Robert, with memories of a happiness he could never replicate. His therapist had suggested a clean break, a severing. And until he left it was funny how he never realised it, that these familiar people and places hadn’t felt like home for a very long time.

Seb disappears back inside the coffee shop after taking the order down and Aaron’s heart goes with him. He finds himself wondering stupid things about him, his handwriting, his turn of phrase, how often he swears. Wondering how much of Robert has bled into him, despite the absence.

Aaron knows he can’t stay. He waits for Seb to come out again with the order, watches the confident way he carries an overloaded tray, and wants to cry. He steps out from the shadows, split down the middle, wanting Seb to look up and see him, remember him, and the other half of him wanting Seb to look past him and for Aaron’s half life to continue without him.

In the end, Aaron’s courage dissolves. He walks briskly away before Seb even has the chance to see him.

*

It’s January before he’s brave enough to go back there, after a Christmas he’d rather forget. He went back to Cam for a one night stand, promising to change, before Cam kicked him out. He scrolled through old photos of Wes to try and work out why things hadn’t worked, and even considered going as back as far as Grant, drunk dialling him and demanding answers on why they’d never gone ahead and had that baby.

He stopped himself, knowing full well what Grant would say. “It was you. You always had excuses, reasons why things weren’t perfect, why it wasn’t right.” What they’d had was great, so good sometimes it was almost able to paper over the cracks. The problem wasn’t Grant, the problem wasn’t even that he didn’t love Grant enough. He did love him. It was just…

He saw Eve at Christmas. When it came to sisters, she was a world away from Liv, but he was glad in some ways they all lived at different points on a spectrum of dysfunction. He’d thought with Paddy as a dad she’d have her head screwed on some more, but that didn’t seem to be the case. It was Eve’s turn to have Christmas with Chas, instead of going to Paddy’s, and the tension was unbearable since Eve had dropped out of university.

A row ensued, Eve shoving back her chair and using Grace’s name in a way that slapped across the room. She’d had counselling for that too, how impossible it was to live up to the memory of a dead sibling who you never knew.

So Aaron used the opportunity to slip outside, to open up an app and wish Vic a Happy Christmas. Something he hadn’t done in five years. She replied just seconds later.

_Oh wow! Hey stranger! Happy Christmas to you too! Hope you’re doing good! X_

It was a shut down. No question asking how he was, no wondering, nothing open. The phone shook in his hands.

_Have you heard from him? Do you know how he is?_

He was close to throwing up waiting for her reply to come through. It was a time like this he wished he still smoked. Anything to pass the time, to occupy his hands.

_I’m sorry, I don’t know. We’re not in touch and I don’t think he wants to be. Sorry. I don’t know what to say. Please look after yourself, don’t dwell on the past. Xmas is hard, I know. X_

He sent her back some kisses, a photo him and Eve had taken together earlier in the day, but he closed the app before reading her reply. He couldn’t face kindness. He thought about ringing Liv, letting her berate him on the phone for going back there in his head, for undoing years’ worth of work. He couldn’t even tell her the worst of it, that he hadn’t deleted the photos and videos of Robert like he’d promised, that he hadn’t chucked his stuff. All those recovery steps he’d lied about and now they were coming back to bite him.

So when January comes there’s only one thing he can do. He sits on one of the tables outside the café and waits. And typically it’s Seb’s day off, so he leaves. It takes a fortnight before he goes back and Seb stands beside him, bright like the sun.

“Hi,” he says, slightly soft and breathless. “What can I get you?”

Aaron stares at Seb long enough to see there’s a graze of recognition which passes in a blink and Aaron’s back to being a stranger to him.

“Do you need a menu?” Seb asks when more seconds pass and Aaron says nothing.

He shakes himself and out of his mouth comes a gruff coffee order, decaf, because he’s trying to be better. Seb brings it out a few minutes later and Aaron can think of nothing to say to him without decades spilling out so he thanks him, drinking his coffee and thinking of the way those early, stolen kisses with Robert had a faint taste of his Americano orders. Going back there is pain and pleasure. Inhale. Exhale. Not one without the other.

He makes a habit of it, sitting on the outside tables of the coffee shop and on the fourth visit when he goes to sit, Seb greets him with a smile.

“I can get you a table inside if you want,” he says. His eyes darted upwards. “It’s meant to chuck it down in a minute.”

“I’ll be alright,” Aaron says, giving him a tight smile back, hands in pockets, slight shrug of the shoulders.

Seb nods. His eyes are Robert’s and Aaron has to look away. “Usual?” Seb says as he turns to go back inside.

“Cheers,” Aaron says, taking his usual seat.

Seb takes longer than usual to come back with his drink, but the rain hasn’t started yet. Aaron notices he’s pushing his phone back into his pocket when he brings out the drink.

“There you go,” he says, but there’s something about the way he lingers that has Aaron on edge, holding his breath. Seb goes to speak, hesitates to stride back to the door, but turns back. “Sorry. This is going to sound a bit weird.”

Aaron looks up, stomach clenching. If he drank the coffee it would turn to ash.

“You’re sort of familiar,” Seb says.

All the nerves make Aaron rigid and he shakes his head before Seb can say anymore. “Don’t think so mate.” He knows he should have laughed to make it more convincing.

There’s a sense of relief on Seb’s face which instantly kills Aaron. “Ah, sorry then. Must have seen you around or something. Do you work nearby?”

Aaron nods, unable to say anymore, knowing there’s something rising up his throat. He’ll cry if Seb asks him to say another word.

“That must be it then!” Seb says and he leaves Aaron to it, hurrying back inside as the sky splits and leaves Aaron soaking for the rest of the afternoon.

February arrives and with it, the 21st comes and the pain of their once anniversary is so blinding, Aaron drives in the sleet to the café where Seb works. He hasn’t been for weeks, couldn’t go back after Seb started wondering if he was familiar. When he arrives, he goes straight in, lingering reminders of Valentine’s Day strung around the place and sees Seb in deep conversation with a girl he works with. He stands in the hot, close queue at the counter shaking, and when he sees the look on Seb’s face he wishes he’d never come. The look is something between shock and hurt and intrigue and confusion and the girl beside Seb mouths: “I’ll go”, but then Seb is stepping forward and Aaron has to hold onto the counter.

He has to speak before Seb does or he’ll never get it out.

“You do know me,” he says to Seb. He catches sight of himself in a mirrored surface behind the counter. Now it’s him who looks like a ghost, grey and pale, as if he’s never slept. “It was a long time ago.”

“No shit,” Seb says, briefly eyeing the customers behind who might have overheard his mumble.

His colleague steps up to him, touches him on the arm. “Babe,” she says, “I’ll cover. Take him to the staff room.”

It happens in a blur, but he’s following Seb round the back of the counter, through a tiny kitchen and in through a doorway into a room with a table pushed against a wall and a sofa. Seb shuts the door and then stands by it, one hand still on the handle.

“Aaron,” he says. It doesn’t come out as a question, but Aaron knows he has to confirm it. “You were Robert’s husband.”

The name jolts him right out of his skin.

“Yeah,” he says, standing bulked and tense in the room because he can’t even imagine being relaxed enough to sit down.

“Fuck,” Seb says and Aaron wants to laugh, but doesn’t, can’t.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron says. He’s instinct is to apologise and run, to never look back, but Seb’s standing in front of the door.

“I thought I recognised you,” he says. He sounds irritated with himself. “I thought you must be famous or something and that’s why you never wanted to hang around for a chat.”

“I’ve never been very good at this sort of thing.”

“You do this often, then? Stalking?”

“It wasn’t… I wasn’t…”

“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Seb says, cycling through his emotions. “Instead of spying on me, saying nothing. It’s weird. It’s creepy. You know,” he starts laughing, an empty, dry laugh, “one of my work mates even said you must fancy me! That you were some sort of perve creeping on young guys. Now I get it.”

“Don’t,” Aaron says. “It’s not like that.”

“It doesn’t run in the family you know!”

Aaron takes a step back, running a hand over his face to calm down. His body has an instant sheen of sweat to hear that kind of tone from Seb. “What?”

“Fancying you. You’re old enough to be…” Seb stops there because to finish what he’s saying would cut them both in different ways. Robert would have said it, would have carried on talking until the words really hurt, and maybe that – that edge of intolerance – comes from deep inside his father too, or maybe the parents he grew up with transferred it to him, the ones who wore that attitude on the outside rather than in.

The room is like a knot, tight with breaths, bodies flared for a fight. Seb removes his hand from the door and leans up against the table instead. He’s tall and long limbed. Him moving means Aaron could leave at any time but he doesn’t, he stays. It’s too soon to take out the photos that’s burning up in his pocket. No one prints photos anymore, but he still has a few physical ones locked away, ones he was told to throw in the bin and stop looking back. 

“It’s weird,” Seb says. “It’s too weird.”

“I’ll go.”

“Why didn’t you just say?” Seb says, cutting off his attempt to flee.

“Because I should never have come in the first place,” Aaron says. “I spotted you and I should have carried on walking. Left the past in the past.”

Seb tuts, rolls his eyes and for the first time Aaron sees Rebecca under there. “You sound like my mum,” Seb says.

It stings. “I sound like my therapist.”

“Did you all just have this pact, like, you’d just never mention him and forget he ever existed?”

“Your mum maybe,” Aaron says. The bitterness has long since passed, but his history is so close to the surface of his skin now, pushing it all back down now is impossible.

“Why?”

“She thought you were too young. She thought it was confusing and upsetting for you, that it was better off if you didn’t get all mixed up in it. She thought it was easier if you stopped seeing all of us.”

He scoffs. Aaron can sense Seb needs to talk, so he lets him, moving back towards the sofa and sitting on the arm. There’s something about the way Seb’s face is when he’s thinking that makes him look older than 20. Suddenly all Aaron can see is those missed years. Everything they would have done, everything he might have been.

“She didn’t tell me until I was twelve,” Seb says. “And I get it. Sort of. I understand why she waited so long. I’d always felt a little bit on the edges, a little bit of an outsider in the family and I never really got it. It wasn’t anything she did or Dad did.” He stops himself, looks Aaron directly in the eye. “Ross, I mean. I know he’s not… but until she told me, I always thought he was. That’s who he is, still. He’s my dad.”

Aaron can only look at his hands, nods. Thinks of the types of conversations he and Robert had when Seb went to live with them, back when that was the biggest problem they faced. “Makes sense. He raised you.”

“Turns out there were a lot of things she didn’t tell me. All the family secrets came flooding out the second I started having an interest in searching the family history. Started to make sense why neither of them wanted to talk about it. There were news articles… about Mum’s family… Dad’s too. It’s fucked up. And then she sat me down and said there was something she had to tell me, something important and she would explain everything.” Seb sucks in a breath, steeling himself to carry on. “She said my dad wasn’t my dad, that my dad is a man called Robert Sugden. That he’s in prison, for murder.”

Aaron’s head is in his hands, but he looks up, confirms it by making eye contact with Seb, can’t even begin to touch on what grief he’s unearthed with that one sentence. He clears his throat.

“So I looked him up. Found news articles about the trial, the sentencing. Said he had a husband. Said he was in there for fourteen years.” Seb falters. “Suppose I should have asked more questions about him, what he did, what he was like. But it was obvious Mum and Dad didn’t want to talk about it. It freaked me out to be honest. I just wanted things to go back to normal. I thought it was bad enough about what had happened to the rest of my family and then I find out that my biological dad is a killer.”

Aaron tries not to wince, tries not to overexplain ancient history. It rises in his chest that feeling of injustice, the spiralling events that started with Lee and ended with Robert taken from him. He felt sick in the past anytime someone talked about fairness, crime and punishment, but now he’d let it become something he couldn’t touch, fearing that if he dug it up again he’d bleed and bleed until there was nothing left of him.

Seb edges one shoe off at the heel with the other, too awkward, too guilty sounding to look at Aaron again.

“You were only a kid. You don’t have to explain. It’s none of my business,” Aaron says.

There’s a knock on the staff room door and Seb’s colleague appears and tells him the boss is due back in ten minutes and that he’ll get a bollocking if it looks like he’s skiving. She takes a good look at Aaron and disappears again. It looks planned, like she’s come to rescue him in case things get too difficult and Aaron rises from the seat, shifting towards the door.

“I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Aaron says. “I’ll head off.”

“Wait!” Seb says. “We haven’t even talked…”

Aaron thinks for a moment and then unfolds the photo from his pocket. He looks around the room for something to write with and sees a pen dangling from the noticeboard on a string. Old school. He writes his number on the back and hands it to Seb with a shrug.

“If you want to call me. Or not. That’s me.”

Seb runs his thumb over the number, as if he’s putting off turning it over, as if he can’t bear to see the other side, but then he does and the whole world slows. It’s the three of them, Aaron and Robert on the sofa and Seb leaning into shot, at the age where he could toddle.

“It was good to see you,” Aaron says, ducking out of the room before he cries. “And I’m sorry again.”

*

Seb rings him the next day, asks to meet up in a pub near the university, says he’s busy with uni work and work-work every day except Thursdays, so Thursday it is. “Can you bring more photos?” he asks. So Aaron does, taking a cleaver to his own heart, shoving all the ones he has printed into an envelope without looking.

“What are you studying?” Aaron asks once they have drinks and a table. Seb’s a cider guy, not a beer guy or a wine guy, and that puts Aaron at a slight ease that perhaps he’s not as posh as he worried he might be. He had to swallow down that knot of thought, the way he and Robert had talked about the type of life they’d wanted to give Seb, one far and away from what they’d had. Once they decided they wanted a whole house full it was impossible not to get carried away on hypotheticals, where they’d like to take the kids on holiday, swimming on Saturdays, theme parks in the holidays.

“Environmental Science,” Seb says. A quiet drifts in and Seb scratches his red earlobe awkwardly. “This is where you tell me Robert always thought I’d be some rich lay-about, sponging off my inheritance.”

Aaron shakes his head. “Mechanic. Or racing car driver. You were always big into your cars. I think he hoped you might take after one of us…”

Seb frowns. His hands wring together on the table and Aaron sees suddenly Seb’s exposed wrist and feels guilty for leaving Robert’s watch at home, for clinging possessively to it when he was supposed to pass it on.

“I used to be a mechanic,” Aaron explains, his lips hovering by the top of his beer glass. “So did your dad. Robert. Although a garage was always far too small fry for him.”

Aaron feels himself growing lighter, warmer just talking about Robert again. There’s a part of him that hates himself for it, but it feels good to bring him to life again with someone who won’t worry about him breaking just by breathing Robert’s name, with someone who barely knows the history.

“What did he do after, for work?”

Aaron sighs. “Haulage business. Mostly. He liked making money. It made him feel good to be a provider. He wasn’t always that selfless, but things changed…”

Seb fishes the photo Aaron gave him out from his pocket and lays it flat on the table. Aaron’s heart catches to see it again so unexpectedly.

“This must have been just before he went to prison,” Seb says. “Judging by my age.”

“Yeah, I think so,” Aaron says, playing down that he can picture that day with the clarity of the room they’re sitting in. His heart is wild in his chest.

“Did I live with you two?”

“For a while, then when your mum and… Ross moved away, we took it in turns to have you at ours.’

It feels like the right time to bring out the photos, so he does, unfolding the envelope from his jacket pocket and sliding it across the table to Seb to give him control.

Seb frowns before he realises what they are and grins. “Oh,” he says. “Old school photos.”

“I had a few on my phone,” Aaron says, shifting in his seat. “But I… er, had an ex who wasn’t too keen on me hanging onto the past.”

Seb gives him a sad look of compassion that brings back Aaron’s fondness in a rush. He can look across the table at this boy and see him as a stranger, but then there’s a glimmer of familiarity and he’s the same burbling kid who he read to to try and get him to sleep.

Seb takes out the photos in a wedge and then keeps them in their neat stack, going through them one by one. He lingers over them, but little passes over his face.

“I know it’s me,” he says, putting the photos down, one finger against the edge. “But I don’t remember any of this.”

“It’s alright.”

“I feel bad,” he says.

“Don’t be stupid.” Aaron leans over to take the photos back but Seb doesn’t budge.

“You looked really happy,” Seb says. He holds up a photo. This one doesn’t have Seb in, it’s one from their honeymoon, Robert gripping his hand on the top of the table in a restaurant. Aaron remembers the face-ache from grinning, how much he hadn’t wanted his photo taken by a random waiter, but how Robert had insisted. How Robert had pronounced some of the Italian items on the menu with a smooth but terrible accent and raised eyebrows. How he’d said ‘husband’ so many times and each time Aaron had become mush.

He has to get rid of all those memories with a blink.

“I look young. I had hair!” He tries to lighten the mood, trying not to focus on the fact he was only 22 when he met Robert and now he’s 46. Half his life gone already.

Seb’s onto another one, the three of them and Liv on a day out. “Who’s the girl?” Seb asks.

“Liv. She’s my sister. She used to live with us. Your biggest fan.”

They both smile and then Seb’s turns quickly sour.

“I kinda wish I did remember,” Seb says, turning to his drink to dampen the awkwardness. “Because you do and, like, it looks like it meant a lot to you at the time.”

“Not just at the time,” Aaron says, scratching over his stubble. With Seb’s focus on the photos, Aaron breathes out, hard, finds himself freed up enough to talk. “It’s why I couldn’t say anything at the café. Not because I didn’t want to, but because… I’m no one to you. You’ve had your whole life and I was a part of it for such a short time, you don’t even remember me. And you were right. I was happy. So happy. And then it was all gone, the life I had, my family. Gone.”

Seb looks up at him and then down. It’s too much for him, too much too soon. Aaron wants to get up from the table, make his excuses and leave, but that would mean leaving the photos behind and he can’t do that.

“Did you resent him for it?” Seb asks.

Aaron frowns as though the thought never even occurred to him.

“Robert,” Seb says, lowering his voice. “He killed a man and threw everything away.”

“I never blamed him,” Aaron says. His view of that blur of intense months is filtered, rose-tinted, but he doesn’t feel anything as sharp as hatred. “What happened ruined his life as well as mine. He lost everything too.”

“He’s a murderer.”

“It wasn’t like that.” He can’t help the way his voice snaps. Defending him was always a reflex.

“The guy…” Seb says, trying to finish the question, and then reaches for his drink in a nervous gulp to wet his mouth. “Mum’s black and white about things.”

“If you knew Robert you’d understand it. The man… Lee, he raped your aunt and kept coming back to the village, tormenting her, threatening her, taunting Robert until he couldn’t take it anymore.”

Seb looks down at the table, taking it all in. Judgement doesn’t pass his face, just thought, confusion. It makes sense he leans towards Rebecca’s take on it all, he’s only had her version, her rough sketch of what Robert was like. All he’s had is an absent father, stories too uncomfortable to tell, too complex to understand.

“It must have been hard,” Seb says. He speaks to fill the awkward silence, but it’s a statement that’s bigger than he knows, one that deserves more than Aaron’s slow nod of the head.

“Did you marry again?” Seb asks. “Sorry if I’m being nosy…”

“You’re all right. And yeah, I did.”

Aaron sees Seb check Aaron’s hand. “But not anymore?” he says.

“No. It didn’t last long.”

“No kids?”

“No,” Aaron says, aware of his leg jittering under the table. “Robert and I were planning to… we had a surrogate, but then… Then after that, with anyone else, my heart wasn’t in it. Not without him.”

He’s never said it out loud to anyone before and once the words leave him, he has to take gulp after gulp of drink just to steady himself.

“Have you…” Seb starts, chickens out. Aaron has to look him in the eye to make him carry on. “got in touch with him?”

Aaron’s shake of his head is barely noticeable and Seb matches it.

“Me neither,” he says and then with a defensive shrug which is all bravado and all too familiar, he adds. “Well if he can’t be bothered with me…”

“He loved you very much.”

“I looked him up,” Seb says. It comes out so suddenly Aaron thinks he’s misheard him. He imagines this is how someone feels before a heart attack. “He isn’t on any social media, except Linkedin.”

Before Aaron can think, Seb’s got his phone out, scrolling through a page that looks like a boring CV, all meaningless words. There’s a photo but it’s too small and blurry to see and he can’t focus on it, because if he does he’ll throw up. He pushes the phone away, which Seb doesn’t seem to notice at first.

“He’s got his own business. In Manchester. Sales and marketing something. Ad campaigns… blah blah…” Seb reads from the screen and then looks up, face dropping when he notices Aaron’s expression for the first time. “Don’t you want to look?”

Aaron’s clammy handed, finishing the last of his drink and scrabbling for the photos. “I’ve got to go,” he says to Seb. “Thanks for the drink.” He’s gone in a whirl wind, sprinting down the street and collapsing when he finally gets to his car, a panic attack building, feeling like shrapnel in his chest.

*

He hears from Seb the next day in a short and apologetic text. In it he sounds painfully young and Aaron regrets ever getting him involved in this fucked up part of his life.

_Hey, sorry if I freaked you out yesterday. Shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that._

There’s a frowny emoji at the end. If his thoughts could be summed up in just an emoji, it would be a house on fire. After Aaron got home from the bar he threw the old photos across the room and then collected them again, refusing to properly look at all those smiling faces, expressions that seemed to belong to other people and another time. He considered getting a lighter and burning them all to dust. Of course he couldn’t bring himself to do it, instead he sobbed, crawling to the floor and loathing himself all over again for how pathetic he felt. He was stuck in that awful year. He’d had a life, he’d had years, but those were running in parallel to the part of him that ended and been abandoned in 2019.

He doesn’t reply to Seb, doesn’t visit the café, doesn’t hear from him again until one day as he’s getting ready to meet Paddy for a drink, his phone rings and it’s Seb. On a whim, he answers, his thumb moving to swipe is almost an outer body experience. He feels the drum of his heartbeat in that dead silence it takes to answer.

“Hello?” he says, pressing himself against the cold bathroom wall at home.

“I met up with him,” Seb says, all of the words coming out in one rush. “Sorry. I just had to tell someone. And you’re the only one who…”

“Okay,” Aaron says, because he wants to say slow down, tell me everything from the start, and he also has a twinge of crippling jealousy which has him bent double. Seb had a bravery to confront the past that Aaron could never muster. How many times had he fantasised about it? That courage. Or coincidence, imagining scenarios where he might bump into Robert in the street or see him across a crowded bar. All those fantasies had sweeping soundtracks, a delirious glaze of unreality. It could never be that simple. Revisiting the past, seeing Robert again couldn’t be a flick of a switch back to happiness, life didn’t work like that.

Seb was talking and Aaron managed to zone back in.

“I just turned up at his office. I didn’t really know what else to do. I think he nearly passed out. I was pretty shocked he knew me straight away. I didn’t even think I looked that much like him, but I suppose I do.”

“You do,” Aaron says without missing a beat.

“Do you want to know? Is it weird me talking about it all? If you don’t want me to say anything I won’t.” He was gabbling. “Sorry. I just don’t know who else to talk to. I don’t know who else would get it.”

“Seb,” he says, heart settling as he finds his way back into a rhythm of fatherhood. Something instinctive and yet strangely unfamiliar. He craved a connection between them, that Seb would somehow sense that Aaron once had dreams for him, could see their whole futures, entwined, spanning years. In the end they’d had so little time together, but afterwards that didn’t matter. It still counted. “You can tell me anything.”

“When you ran out of the bar…”

“I know, look, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Seb says. “I totally get it. It’s painful for you. Probably more than anyone else. I don’t have any memories of him. But, well, that’s all you have left.”

His words are so blunt but without any malice, that Aaron finds himself sitting on the edge of the bath and telling Seb to carry on, to start at the beginning and tell him as much as he wants. He tries to detach himself like a piece of old skin, listen to Seb retelling his day like it’s a story, invented, nothing at all that cuts deep.

“We went for lunch, neither of us really ate anything. Too much to say, not knowing how to start. He rang his office and said he wouldn’t be going back that afternoon. Said he’s the boss, he can get away with things like that. Grinned. It relaxed me a bit, even though I think he was trying to show off a bit. We just sat and talked. I asked him a lot of stuff, told him everything about my life. The more we talked the more upset he was and I felt pretty bad about that. So we went for a walk, somewhere a bit quieter.”

There’s a lull, Aaron hears himself speak. “How is he?”

“I don’t really have much to compare it to,” Seb says. “He was quiet, thoughtful. Listened more to me going on than he talked. He didn’t seem to want to talk much about prison so I didn’t really ask once I realised he didn’t want to remember it. He talked about the present, his work mainly, what his apartment is like, the car he drives.”

Aaron can’t bear to ask the obvious, if Robert is seeing anyone, and Seb glosses over it to spare him, which he’s half relieved about and half in agony. Did he wear a wedding ring? Was there a mention of another family?

“And how did you feel?” Aaron asks. “Seeing him?”

“I’m alright,” Seb says sounding so far away. “I got on with him alright. It was a bit weird, some awkward silences. But yeah…”

“Do you think you’ll see him again?”

“I don’t know. We left it open. I’d like to keep in touch maybe but… it’s difficult. I know technically he’s my dad…”

Aaron knows what he means, hurts because of it. Feels Robert’s pain.

“He could’ve kept in touch, couldn’t he? If he’d wanted to.”

There’s resentment there and Aaron can tell just by the way he sounds that this meeting hasn’t made up for the years Robert was out of his life. It doesn’t happen overnight. They might never have the relationship they should have. It doesn’t work like that.

“It would have been hard for him to be a proper dad to you from inside prison,” Aaron said, a reflexive spike of defence to his voice.

“That’s what he said. He said I was better off without him.”

Aaron has to screw up his face, hold his breath to stop himself crying. Hearing Seb talk is too much of an echo of the past.

“Aaron?” Seb asks, a panic in the way he says it, worried Aaron’s run away again.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“I told him that I’d met you.”

Aaron stands up sharply from the edge of the bath, walks out of the bathroom and shuts himself away in the bedroom, closing the door behind him like someone might intrude. He sits on the floor, back to the bed.

Seb carries on talking as though he’s aware that Aaron can’t speak. His voice is light, carefree but Aaron’s mouth is as dry as sand, tongue sticking.

“I only had to mention your name and his whole face changed. I know people say it, and it’s a cliché, but it was like someone switched the light on. He didn’t freeze, he was leaning over the table asking me a hundred questions about you.”

“Right,” Aaron says. That’s all he can think to say.

“I told him it’s not my place to tell him. But I told him how nice you were to me, that you showed me photos. How much you still seem to think about him.” Seb pauses. “Is that alright? It’s not any of my business…”

Aaron’s attention is suddenly everywhere by the phone call, a deflection method, studying everything from the pleat of the blinds to the uneven patches of colour on the wood flooring. The noise of the traffic outside, a pile of old post he’d stuffed behind a cabinet. Seb was right, it isn’t his responsibility to bridge the gap between them, to hint to Robert that there is years of longing coming from Aaron like a bad smell, that he’s a strange, sullen wreck of a man, life on pause. He used to think his life was more than that, he used to think he could kid himself, but it’s only now, that absence reawakened, he realises how much it has come to define him. A missing part.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Aaron says.

“Aaron…” Seb says tentatively. “Why don’t you just call him?”

Because, he wants to say, time has passed, life has moved on. It’s history. It’s water under the bridge. Too much has happened. We’re different people. We’re not meant to be.

Instead he can’t say any of that. None of it is true. All of it sentimentalised bullshit.

“I don’t know if I can,” he says.

*

Aaron knows that if he cancels on Paddy it’ll only make him start asking questions, so he drives into the depths of the countryside, back to Emmerdale to have dinner with Paddy and Mandy, doing all he can to put Robert and Seb’s phonecall out of his mind. It bothered him for a long while to see his mum and Paddy’s relationship end, but in the end they seemed lighter apart, happier as friends. It was funny how quickly they returned to that old routine, and how supportive Chas had been when he announced he and Mandy had fallen back in love.

It's easier said than done to stop thinking about Robert returning to the village where every inch of it is a reminder of their history. Every place has a memory, an echo of his voice. Aaron doesn’t allow himself to look at the Mill as he passes, driving straight to Paddy and Mandy’s new build without even looking at the home Robert built for them. When he parks up he sits in the car for a second, paralysed by a memory he’d long buried.

*

They were outside in the back garden, drinking coffee, their breath cloudy in the cold April air. It had only been hours since Natalie had agreed to be their surrogate and Aaron had managed to coax Robert away from the computer – from online banking, from IVF clinics, from surrogacy advice groups – and out of the house to get a breather.

“I think we should look into making the garden bigger,” Robert said. “Contact the farmer, see if we can buy up some of the land behind the house. We’ll have to convert the second flat, make it ours again.”

Aaron was light, full of laughter. “Steady on! Nothing’s even happened yet. We’ve got the IVF to pay for first before you start demolishing walls.”

“I know,” Robert said, putting his hand on Aaron’s shoulder, leaning into him as if he was trying to steer him in the direction of a future he could see so clearly. “But before you know it we’ll have a house full of kids and we’ll need more space.”

Aaron had laughed softly, rested his head against him and sighed. “Don’t get carried away,” he said.

“I’m excited,” Robert said. “I want to give them everything. A proper life. A treehouse.”

Aaron snorted and Robert turned him around.

“What? I want everything to be perfect.”

“A treehouse?”

“I always wanted one.” He lowered his head so their foreheads were touching. “This time next year we could have a baby.”

“Robert…” Aaron was quiet, staring at Robert the dreamer, his eyelids closed. “I just don’t want to get our hopes up.”

“It’s going to happen. Okay? Whatever it takes.”

*

Paddy taps on the window of his car, breaking Aaron’s trance. They hug and eventually head inside where Mandy has cooked a meal so homely his body just gives at the smell.

Usually Paddy can crack him like a nut, sensing exactly when something is wrong, but he’s thankful that night for Mandy’s energy, for the way she steals all of Paddy’s attention. She’s still annoying, still gregarious even for a woman in her sixties, but the distraction is welcome. Paddy does notice something off-colour about him but Aaron brushes it off as work stuff, which he knows is transparent, but he can’t think of a better lie. He couldn’t dare mention the R word, not when everyone thinks he’s long past that, fixed, cured.

After they say goodbye Aaron gets into his car and spots a message on his phone. His stomach lurches when he sees it’s from Seb. He puts the phone down without reading it and drives away with a wave at Paddy and Mandy who are standing by the window, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hide any changes in his face if he read the message in front of them. Instead he drives out of the village and pulls over at a layby – not ‘theirs’, he doesn’t have it in him – and reads the text.

_Your choice, but I think he’d love to hear from you. Seriously._

Attached is Robert’s contact details, a swirl of numbers that Aaron can’t focus on. He throws the phone into the passenger seat and punches his fist into the steering wheel. It goes against everything he’s been fighting against for years. He grieved, his body wrenching through a funeral every time Robert’s name was mentioned, that hollowness never being filled, others only appearing in it like smoke, nothing solid and everlasting like he was.

It's getting dark. He’s been sitting in the layby for half an hour in silence watching the clouds tie together. He closes his eyes and sees the future splitting. He makes the call. He doesn’t.

If he doesn’t, life goes on unchanged, the same, another guy, another failure, perhaps someone who isn’t him but does enough to give Aaron the pretence of living. Then one day perhaps he’ll hear his name again, see an obituary, a businessman passing away of old age and then he’ll grieve again.

And if he does make the call…

Aaron picks up the phone, taps to add it to contacts, as if to make it official, to sign some sort of contract, and then he presses call, holds the phone to his ear and waits. It is blood in his head. Ticking.

The dial tone doesn’t last long and then the sound opens up like the ocean, a blur of noise, lots of voices, bodies, laughter, chatter. He’s called at the wrong time, wrong place. He’s in a public, busy place, a bar or a restaurant. Aaron winces, goes to hang up and then, his voice.

“Hello? Robert Sugden.”

Aaron’s throat cracks. He can’t speak.

“Hello? Who is this?” Robert repeats, then again, growing irritated.

He’ll hang up, Aaron thinks. What if he ends the call and blocks the number? Aaron puts his hand to his throat where it scratches.

“Hi,” Aaron says.

There’s silence on the other end. Even above the chatter of wherever he is, Aaron can hear his voice catch, breath hitch. “God,” he says, the rest of his exclamation swallowed up. “Is it…?”

“Yeah,” Aaron says, roughing wiping the stubborn tears away which refused to stay in his eyes.

“Hold on,” Robert says, then more insistent. “Hold on. Don’t go anywhere, I’m just going outside.”

Aaron’s heart thrashes, body flushing like he’s been filled with brand new blood. He waits, hears the sound muffle like Robert’s put his hand over the speaker to explain where he’s going to someone, and then it’s back up to his ear and mouth again, and all Aaron hears is his breathing, up and close and intimate like the two of them are back to sharing the same air.

Voices, voices, then a rush of empty sound. He’s outside and it dawns on Aaron that he’s actually going to have to speak. He leans his forehead against the cool glass of the car window and watches it steam with his breath. Then Robert is back, jitty, breathless, his attention solely on Aaron. Aaron whole body keens.

Robert breathes deeply into the phone, a cry of “Oh!”, an anguish coming somewhere from his throat. “Aaron,” he says. It feels like the first time in a lifetime that Aaron’s heard his own name out loud. “I can’t believe it. How-how are you?”

Aaron’s voice croaks. “Yeah, I’m…”

There’s silence on the other end which reminds Aaron of cartoon stars circling around someone’s head. A knock out blur. “Your voice it’s…” Robert says.

“Older. We both are.”

“I was going to say gruffer. Sexier.”

Aaron’s gut flinches. He remembers dark nights, heat and heartbeats, putting his mouth against Robert’s throat, groaning as he came and knowing the deep timbre of his voice would have Robert collapsing.

“Where are you?” Robert says, the words rushing out. “I can get a cab, I can – “

“No,” Aaron says. “No. I’m at not home.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. I just…’ There’s a blank again, then soft, uncertain he says, ‘It’s so good to hear you. How have you been? I saw Seb. He told me he’d seen you. Did he give you my number?”

“Yeah. He’s a great lad.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Robert says and then almost immediately corrects himself, a kneejerk reaction. Aaron recognises the signs, lessons from therapy kicking in. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I’m having therapy to try and deal with stuff and sometimes things come out all wrong.”

“Is it helping?”

“A bit,” he says. “My PTSD is under control, but my bitterness, regrets… not so much.”

“PTSD?” Aaron asks, old urges to comfort him making him physically ache. “From being inside.”

“Yeah. You’ve been there, you know what it can do.”

“Robert…” His grief is leaking through the phone now.

“Don’t,” he says. He’s tight as a coil. It’s like the old Robert, boxed up, the painful parts of his life dismissed, buried. “Things are on the up now. I don’t even think about it. It’s over.”

Aaron clears his throat. “Right.” It’s suddenly cold. It’s not like Aaron expected apologies or begging for forgiveness, but it’s like he can flip a switch and that kind of abruptness in him makes Aaron uneasy.

“It’s not good, is it? To go over and over it. You don’t need it either. Dragging up the past.”

“You can’t fool me, you know.” It’s been years, but Aaron’s sure that no one knows Robert better.

Robert cuts him off. “Can I see you, in person?” 

“What? Drag up the past?”

“Come on. You know what I mean,” he says. “Please.”

“I don’t know…”

“Why did you call me if you didn’t want to see me?” There’s an edge to his voice, tipping into a velvety flirtation. Even the thought of his smile is the sexiest thing Aaron’s had grasp of in months.

“It’s been years.”

“Things have changed. I get it.” Even through the phone Robert is stiff, business-like. Just like that, the atmosphere changes.

Silence again. This time cloying, heavy. A regret builds in Aaron’s belly so uncomfortable it feels like a stone. He should never have called, should have left things as they were, unfinished, unknowing, all those happy memories buried deep underground.

“Tell me you’re okay,” Robert says, the desperation familiar. He was always gentle in concern, his eyes revealing a fear that Aaron might slip into a dark, insular path.

Aaron places the points of his fingers against the window. Even his hands are starting to look old now. So much and so little has changed. He sighs. “What do you want me to say?” It doesn’t sound angry because he’s not. Neither of them can fix this, and Robert is right, things have changed. It’s not as if words across a cold phoneline can mend their broken years, their hearts.

“Tell me about you. Your family. I want to hear about everything I’ve missed.” He says the words like the don’t sting him, but to hear them hurts and Aaron has to press the phone to his neck just to swallow back the tears rising again.

“You don’t,” Aaron says, so fragile he can’t be sure Robert even heard it. He clears his throat. “I can’t talk now. I’ll call you at a better time, yeah?”

He gets the tail end of Robert’s response, a stunned _alright_ and Aaron hangs up. The car feels suddenly too small and he has to get out of it, lean against it and try to remember how to breathe.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aaron and Robert finally come face to face after years apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your absolutely lovely comments. It's such a reward for me to hear you're enjoying it - or crying! - and the bits you like best.

He can’t sleep that night and the whole bedroom is blue and glowing from the light of his phone. He reads everything he can about Robert’s business, visiting his website and clicking straight for the ‘About’ page. It’s a lot of emotionless jargon, corporate words he doesn’t understand. There’s a brief sentence that mentions him restarting life, working his way up in a new industry and there’s a catch in Aaron’s throat, a resentment that Robert can turn something so gut-wrenching into a clinical, positive quality for his résumé.

He tries to be angry with him, hurt. There’s a picture of him in black and white, an open collar shirt, a smile making his eyes creased. His face has lost some of its sharp angles but he’s still as handsome as ever. They call men with signs of age ‘distinguished’ and that’s exactly what he is, wearing wrinkles and tiredness like a badge of his hard work and ambition.

A photo isn’t enough and neither is the impersonal spiel of his business portfolio. Aaron misses the man, his humour, his hands, his wry smile, the way one look can curve all of his insides. He’s missed it for so long its worn holes in him.

Who is he trying to kid?

He takes a train to Manchester, unable to keep his leg still and irritating the woman sitting in the opposite aisle. He wants to confront her but instead smirks to himself. All the nerves and excitement have him shedding years. He feels like he used to feel in the hours leading up to meeting with Robert in the days when they were fucking behind Chrissie’s back. Robert texting him a time and place and Aaron half hard before Robert even showed up. The anticipation was half of it, knowing they didn’t have long, that it would be quick and stolen and electric. It used to drive him crazy. There’d be nights where Aaron knew he was in bed next to Chrissie or up late at night in the office pretending to work where they’d exchange explicit, hungry texts and Aaron would play disinterested, hard to get even though he was already jerking off and making Robert work double for it. _Tell me what you’ll do to me_ , he’d type, when he wanted to say: _Tell me you love me._

The buzz is close to how it was then, only now it’s different, less sexual (although of course he’s thought about how easily they’d fit back together) and more dread-filled, more damaged. It’s two bruised bodies meeting again years after an accident, working out the rules of trust, what remains broken. It won’t, can’t, ever be what it was, he tries to tell himself. It doesn’t have the anticipation of when they were happy, when they were settled into married life, where a night away on a work trip meant being reunited at home, smelling stale, having missed having him to sleep beside. This kind of anticipation could never be that domestic, that normal. That kind of life cannot be replicated. Aaron knows it’ll always hang over them, what they had, what they lost.

He’s thinking now as if this is it, as if today is a reunion, one that means forever. He’s let excitement, dread, nerves lead him down a dangerous path. He put on a shirt, aftershave, trimmed his salt-and-pepper beard into stubble. And still, a part of him hates him, hurts. Resents the full stop his life became. He flips between the two.

He walks to Robert’s office because he needs to shake off some of his energy. He catches sight of himself in the glass front of another office block almost expecting to see a guy in his twenties, shocked at the image of someone much older. It makes him falter, doubt himself. What if their years apart mean they have nothing to say to each other, what if Robert’s personality is unrecognisable to the man Aaron fell in love with, what if Robert’s attraction is no longer there.

Aaron finds the office block and buys himself a coffee from a vendor outside and sits on a bench with it, held between both hands. He watches people come and go. He’s read enough about the business to know Robert has a small team but a steady flow of meetings, enough interest to open a second office site in a different city.

And then, he’s there, standing outside the glass entrance checking his phone. Aaron can do nothing but stare at him, heart thumping then stopping. He wants him to look up, their eyes to meet, a smile to take hold of him and never diminish. His hair is a light grey, could be blonde if he kidded himself in sunlight, he’s still as tall and trim as ever. The kind of man that can make Aaron’s body sway with no effort at all. Aaron leaves his coffee on the bench and stands up, shaking. The distance between them is too far for Aaron to call out. He’ll have to walk over, step into his path and wait for the realisation to hit him. The man he married. Twice. The man he promised everything to. The man who made him feel alive, gave him a future and then ended it.

He walks forward a few paces, heart racing. Robert looks up from his phone, but to his right. Someone has called his name. Aaron looks in the direction Robert looks. He’s smiling now, face free of any concern. A woman strides towards him, mid-forties, tall, tanned, glossy hair. Robert kisses her on the mouth and Aaron stops dead in his tracks. They talk a few moments, but all Aaron can focus on is the way the ground seems to sweep away under his feet. He can’t move, but then they’re coming towards him, his hand lightly on her back, closer and closer. Aaron looks left to right, an escape route, but it’s too late. He sees all the colour drain from Robert’s face, his hand fall away from the woman, his feet stuttering to a standstill.

“Rob?” the woman says, noticing she is further ahead by a step and he has stopped, staring straight at Aaron.

“I, I’ll catch you up,” he says, but he can’t manage a smile. She’s not falling for it, she can see him looking straight at Aaron. She hangs back.

Aaron feels a twist of jealousy, deep and visceral then berates himself for it. Robert isn’t his, hasn’t been for a long time. It hadn’t stopped him feeling like he was cheating every time he fell for someone, even if the intensity of that sense of betrayal diluted every time.

As Robert looks between him and the woman he gets the feeling from him, coming off him in waves – this is not how I wanted this to go. It’s not ideal for Aaron either, but showing up at his work unannounced was never going to be the fantasy reunion regardless.

Why had he even expected him to be single? Why hadn’t he thought the obvious, that Robert would find someone else? A lover, a partner, a spouse. Aaron wishes he could rewind time, blend into the crowd and disappear.

Aaron’s throat croaks, so he speaks with more strength. “It’s been a while,” he says, though he’s talking more to the woman than he is Robert. He keeps it light hearted, like they’re old school friends who forgot to catch up.

“It’s so good to see you,” Robert says in a way that’s too breathless, too intimate. Aaron’s sure the woman will notice, even the heaviest duty heteronormative lens couldn’t fail to sense something between them. Robert clears his throat, all too aware of the atmosphere. “What are the chances!”

The shrug Aaron’s mouth gives is humourless. The laddish front Robert puts up between them is hollow, even the woman beside him looks uneasy, one hand impatiently on her phone.

“I looked up where your office was,” Aaron says by way of explaining why he’s there, gesturing. “You’ve done alright.”

The woman smiles double the size of Robert’s. She’s proud of him, flattered to be with him.

“Don’t get him started,” she says, almost confident enough to touch Aaron on the forearm. “His ego will never recover!”

“I can imagine,” Aaron says, feeling Robert’s appraising gaze go up and down the length of him.

“Are you old friends? School?” she asks.

“You should have called. We could’ve gone for a drink. Catch up.” Robert’s tone is as serious as it is awkward. There’s an obvious fog between them, Robert refusing to introduce them, resistant to his two worlds crossing over. There’s an uncomfortable familiarity in it that shudders through Aaron.

“It’s fine, mate,” Aaron says. He’s already hands in his pockets, edging away.

“Where are you living now?” Robert’s voice calls him back. There’s a heartbeat tying them together. “In the village?”

Aaron shakes his head. “I couldn’t.”

Robert looks like Aaron feels. Punched. “Local still?”

The woman leans on Robert’s arm. “Why don’t you have dinner with us? We’re only going round the corner.”

Robert looks at her with alarm, then at Aaron. “He’ll be wanting to get back home to his family. Some other time.” It’s so impersonal, so stilted Aaron’s jaw becomes solid.

“Yeah. Thanks though, for the offer,” Aaron says, nodding at the woman. He doesn’t correct Robert. Let him feel the same, he thinks. That pang, that curiosity and jealousy fusing together. Let him imagine the life he promised, me with someone else.

Don’t, he thinks. Don’t do this. He deserves to live, to love, even if you can’t.

“Next week sometime?” Robert says, desperate like a man slipping off the edge of a cliff.

“Can’t,” Aaron says. “I’m going away.”

“Where?”

The pulse of Robert’s interrogation has the woman shifting the bag on her hip, wanting to escape.

“Work,” Aaron says. “France. There’s still good money there.”

“Are you still in scrap?”

Aaron’s eyes meet his, the way the desperation pools in the blue-green. He wants to know nothing’s changed.

Aaron makes a vague noise. “Not anymore, no.”

The woman checks the time on her phone and Robert notices the unsubtle way she is pulling him away. He straightens, then seems to dig in his heels.

“Soon then,” he says to Aaron, noticing the tight way the woman on his arm smiles. “Please.”

“Yeah.” It’s lazy the way he says it, non-committal. He watches Robert’s hope rise, then sink as he walks off with her, arm in arm. Aaron wants him to turn back, to look over his shoulder, but he doesn’t, even if everything in him is rigid, using all his effort not to.

*

He hasn’t had flashbacks in a long time, but there he is, doubled over in the early hours of an April morning, reliving the afternoon his car crashed off the side of the bypass into a quarry. He still has dreams of a different ending, drowning, Robert unable to pull him free in time, saving Lachlan first instead of him. Maybe that’s what it’s always come down to – that primal fear of not being picked, not being first choice.

It’s Robert’s birthday and Aaron puts off sending him a message until late into the evening. He gets a message back almost immediately.

_Thanks. I thought you’d forgotten x_

_Never_ _x_

  1. _Fucking hell. Can you believe it? X_



Aaron taps his phone against his teeth. How is he meant to reply when Robert texts with such lightness, such absence of history? He wants to remind him that every time his birthday passed, it was agony. He wants to remind him he’s been out of prison for years and he never got in touch. In the end he doesn’t have to think of something else to say, because another message pings through from Robert.

_The woman the other day I was with is Jules. We’ve been dating for a few months. She’s not my wife or anything._

Aaron replies: _It’s nothing to do with me._

_I want to see you._

_What for?_

Aaron watches the dots appear, then disappear, then appear again sending him into a trance. Messages written and deleted, recomposed.

_Because I’ve missed you._

The text gives Aaron a swirling, white noise between his ears. It’s everything he imagined, and simultaneously makes him feel sick with anxiety. Another text comes through.

_Dinner? On me. It’s the least I can do. Or a drink. Don’t want to step on anyone’s toes._

Then another from Robert, within seconds.

_As long as he knows he’s the luckiest man in the world._

_Dinner would be good._

What else could he admit to? That his whole life without Robert had been a failure? He was single, divorced, lonely. Lurching from one serious relationship to the next, numb.

*

He turns up to the restaurant late on purpose to keep Robert sweating. He’s booked an Italian place, casual, lower lighting than Aaron would have liked and later Robert admits the same, he struggles to read menus in dim lighting even though now he wears contacts and is considering surgery.

When Aaron arrives, leaving his jacket in the entrance of the restaurant with a woman who takes it from him, he appears at the table wearing a dark grey shirt, untucked, one button undone at the neck. Robert stands up to greet him as though this is a business dinner and they stand opposite sides of the table not knowing what to do with their bodies. In the end Aaron sits, shifting his eyes away from the crest-fallen look on Robert’s face. Aaron’s thought about those arms around him, being pressed chest to chest, having Robert nestle his mouth into Aaron’s shoulder and neck crease like he always used to. But he can’t do that. He can’t torture himself like that.

They cycle through all the filler chat. Was your journey okay? Is the restaurant okay? Do you want to look at the drinks’ menu? How’s your day been?

When they’ve exhausted all that, Aaron looks at him. He looks as he always did, expensive. A clean pale blue shirt rolled back at the sleeves exposing an expensive watch, freckles on his forearms. He smelt good. It made Aaron’s belly warm. He remembered the frisson of being wrapped in that smell. Of that smell becoming theirs.

Robert puts the menu down, his thumb stroking the stem of the wine glass just for something to do.

“Aaron Dingle,” he says, half sighed.

“Don’t,” Aaron says, looking down, immediately spotting in his periphery that Robert’s back is straightened, alert and on the defence.

“What?” The way he says it, it’s almost incredulous.

The waiter arrives and they both order, Aaron disinterested and ordering something cheap that he won’t mind leaving if he has to get out of there fast. When the waiter leaves, Aaron resumes.

“You don’t get to put on a front with me,” Aaron says, surprised by how angry it comes out. “You don’t get to pretend we can pick up where we left off.”

“I’m sorry,” Robert says, sitting back in his seat, shoulders giving way. Aaron realises he doesn’t want that reaction either. This version of Robert, so easily defeated, isn’t him either.

Aaron lets the silence play out, too stubborn for any backtracking. “You’ve done alright for yourself,” he says.

“You know me.” The bravado is soft, dented.

“How did you manage it? When you got out?”

Robert avoids his eye at the mention of prison. “I was cellmates with a bloke who got done for armed robbery. And manslaughter. But we got on, looked out for each other. We talked about life, work. Everything,” he pauses, overturns his fork, “He saw the pictures I had of you and me, asked me about you. Said his brother was gay. He asked me what I was going to do for work when I got out and I hadn’t really thought about it, it felt too far away, too surreal. So he introduced me to his dad and I got work through him, worked my way up, made some good impressions…”

“When you were in there-”

“Do you mind if we don’t?” Robert’s interruption is sharp. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Course.”

“All you need to know is, I’m okay now. I’m getting through it.”

Aaron nods a little. “Good.” He looks down at his hands on the table, realising they’re shaking a little. “When I got over the hurt… that’s what used to keep me awake at night, the thought of something happening…”

“I’m tougher than I look,” Robert says with a flash of a smile.

“You’re not.”

The drinks are laid out between them, bread and oil. There is some idle chat about things that don’t matter, about the city, changes, Robert’s company, the new site he’s setting up where the builders have overrun. Robert asks gentle questions about the Dingles, not daring to ask about those closest to home like Liv or Chas or Aaron’s sister he never got to meet. Aaron doesn’t mention them either, like he can’t bear to crack the eggshell and everything to spill out. He wants to cry, list everything Robert missed, list every family celebration Aaron had to go to alone, all of Liv’s successes and heartbreaks, how many times there was still a flash of Robert in her even though he’d only been there for a fragment of her life. Like a lightning strike. And Eve, Eve had only ever heard a whisper of his name seen a photograph. Aaron felt like without Robert in his life, Eve had only ever known half of him. She had come into his life as Robert left and there was something about those events overlapping that always left him a little colder towards her than he wanted.

When the food comes, Aaron asks, “So what did you do for your birthday?”

“It wasn’t much of a day,” he says. “I went into work.”

Aaron makes a noise.

“What? Someone’s got to make things happen!”

Aaron doesn’t want to focus on the fact work is all he has now, no family – and knowing Robert – no friends. Aaron finds his mouth speaking without control.

“Jules didn’t take you out?”

Robert slips a forkful of pasta into his mouth and pushes it into one side of his cheek. He barely looks at Aaron. “She did.”

“How did you meet?” Aaron wants to choke, stop himself, but he’s on runaway mode.

“Work,” he says. “Through a colleague.”

Aaron nods like a dog figurine in the back of a car. “She seemed nice.”

Robert sighs, his fork tapping against the pasta bowl in a rhythm. “And you?” he probes. “How long have you and…? I saw a… a wedding picture on your… I went on your Facebook. He’s a good looking guy…”

Aaron smirks, straight into the pasta sauce. “Don’t use Facebook anymore,” he says. “Eve says no one’s used it for ten years.”

“I’m out of date,” Robert says. “Still catching up.”

“You’re old now. Ancient.”

Robert grins. “That bad?”

“You were always a bit… you know, over the hill.”

“Me?!”

Aaron shrugs, breaks off a chunk of bread to wipe at the bowl. “We’re not together anymore,” he says. “I’m not with anyone.”

It’s as if only now Robert’s seen his ringless finger. “Oh,” he says. “What…”

“Not any of your business, is it?”

Robert slumps, then concedes. “No, it’s not.”

They eat for a little while in silence, Robert orders more wine for them both. Aaron becomes acutely aware that they’re surrounded by couples on all sides, that tea-lights have been slipped onto each table. Robert talks briefly about his meeting with Seb but Aaron doesn’t press him on it knowing what a fragile topic it is, how hard for them both to know they will never have the relationship with him they envisaged. Seb wants to keep it casual, Robert says, he doesn’t need another dad. I don’t know how to be one either, Robert says. It prickles.

By the time he’s finished his pasta, Aaron feels a little light-headed from the wine.

“You’ve hardly told me anything about you,” Robert says. Aaron notices a shift in his voice, like this is foreplay, his tongue running against him.

“Not much to say.”

“There’s years. I want to know everything.”

“You don’t.”

“I want to know what I missed.”

“Nothing. It’s you that’s managed to… you know!” he reaches for the wine. “Press the reset button.”

The words are like a slap across Robert’s face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Start again. Pick up where you left off. You’ve got it made, haven’t you?”

“What did you want me to do?”

“Suffer,” Aaron says. When the sharp words leave him he realises how desperately he wishes he could take them back.

“I thought I did that. Fourteen years staring at the same four walls. Without you.”

“That was your choice. All of it. Prison, letting me go.”

“I did it for you, to give you a life.”

“Well you fucked that up, didn’t you?”

Aaron downs the rest of the wine in one bitter swig. He stands up, a slight sick sway. He looks between their empty dishes. “Text me how much I owe you for the meal.”

“You’re not going?” Robert’s only half out of his seat, calling for him to wait. “Aaron, please! Don’t go!”

But it’s too late. Aaron leaves and Robert knows better than to follow.

*

It doesn’t go unnoticed by his staff at the garage that he’s in the worst mood ever. He even sacks off the day’s work by going to lunch early, choosing to eat at the greasy spoon even though he’d promised his GP he’d start eating healthier and drinking less. When he gets back to the garage, there’s a flash car parked outside and it doesn’t take long for his brain to catch up to the rhythm of his heart. Robert is standing there with a whole tray of posh coffees, chatting to Aaron’s senior mechanic.

“Who’s supervising Tam?” Aaron calls to Josh, the mechanic when he arrives, blanking Robert completely. Tam’s their apprentice and he’s not supposed to be let off around the garage on his own during his first week.

Elsie, spanner in hand, the youngest of their little team, rolls herself out from one of the cars. “I sent him to buy some cake to go with the coffees your friend brought.”

Robert says nothing the whole time, but he’s wearing a little smile at the edges of his mouth which makes Aaron want to punch him. He can feel the thoughts radiating from Robert – _can’t ignore me now_.

“You haven’t got time to take a break. Customer’s coming back in an hour.”

“Yeah and it’ll take forty minutes,” Elsie says. She raises her cup up to Robert. “Cheers for this.”

“Does he always work you this hard?” Robert asks.

Josh ducks out of the conversation, sneaking his coffee into the office, knowing Aaron’s temper all too well.

“Why are you here?” Aaron snaps at Robert. “I’m working.” Elsie looks at Josh through the window into the office and raises her eyebrows.

“You didn’t answer my calls.”

Aaron glares at him as if to say: not here.

“So you stalked him?” Elsie says, she looks at her coffee like he might have poisoned it.

Aaron squeezes the bridge of his nose. “Els, can you get back to work? I need it done before three.”

She salutes him sarcastically and then looks warily at Robert.

“He stalked me first,” Robert says. “You might want to mention that you hung around outside my office.”

Elsie looks at him for confirmation. Aaron shrugs, swipes a coffee from the tray and pokes his head round the office to speak to Josh. “I won’t be long. Can you order those parts from Benson’s?”

Aaron leads the way out of the garage and they walk towards a park and small children’s playground. It’s early afternoon so it’s practically empty, one mum in a green coat and a grizzly kid on the slide.

“You’re a hard man to track down,” Robert says before they sit on opposite ends of a bench.

“Is that your excuse?” Aaron says, feeling the wind lash his cheeks red. He’s decided he hasn’t got time for the preamble, he wants it all flushed out of his system so he can get on with his life.

Robert looks over to him, not understanding.

Aaron wants to growl at Robert’s inability to know what he’s getting at. He clenches his jaw, feet drumming on the ground. He’s back there, watching his phone, the date change, Robert’s release lodged into his head. “You never called me. When you got out.”

“I was a mess,” he says. He speaks without emotion, but not like a man who doesn’t feel any, like a man whose taught himself to breathe through it. “You didn’t need a mess in your life. Not after fourteen years. Not when I’d barely said a word to you in all that time.”

“Making choices for me _again_!” The anger is real. He can’t even look at him.

“Whatever I did I’d have made your life worse. I couldn’t ruin your life anymore than I already had done. I got out of prison and I looked you up within hours on a phone so old and cracked and… one that still had a photo of us on the lockscreen. There was my profile, frozen in time, and there was yours.”

Aaron looks at him, seeing tears in his eyes. Robert doesn’t meet his gaze. It’s somehow both a surprise and inevitable that Robert looked him up online.

Robert is incredulous, voice catching. “How could you even think I wouldn’t? When for all of those years you were the first and last thing I thought about? Prison was meant to be the punishment, but no, I tortured myself every day on the ‘what ifs’. That was the real punishment.”

Aaron looks down at his hands and the drips from his eyes which land on them as he sits hunched over, not wanting Robert to see.

“And like I said, I wasn’t in a good place. I needed help to get out of that. And you, I knew how much effort it would have taken to get over what I did to you. It would have been selfish of me to walk straight out of prison and back into your life.”

Robert carries on and Aaron doesn’t stop him.

“I looked you up and there you were…” his voice twists into something wistful, like Robert can see the image clear in his mind. “Gorgeous as ever. Slightly grumpy in the photo like you hadn’t wanted it taken and it was the best of a bad bunch. Then I kept looking, scrolling through your profile – crap security settings by the way – and saw this life I’d missed out on. Your house, _Wes_ …” Robert puts ‘Wes’ in air quotes and Aaron both winces and flushes that Robert memorised his ex’s name. “Your dog, your… daughter.”

“Wait, what?”

“Aaron, she’s beautiful.”

Aaron frowns. “No, hang on. I don’t have any kids.”

It’s the first time their eyes meet and Robert withdraws, back into his seat, face crumpling as he tries to make sense of his assumptions. “You were holding her in the photo. She was a toddler, these huge blue eyes.”

“I’d know if I had a kid.” It finally clicks for Aaron. He remembers the photo. A family BBQ back in the village, in the Woolie garden six years ago. “Rose,” he says. “My niece. She’s eight now.”

“Niece.”

“Liv’s.”

Robert’s eyes widen and then he smiles sadly. “I still think of her as fourteen.”

“You wouldn’t recognise her.”

“No,” Robert says. “I suppose not.”

The wind picks up and stiffens them both. Aaron thinks several times about making his excuses and going back to the garage. They don’t need him, but sitting there with Robert is like having his chest filled with cement.

“I thought you’d have a whole house full,” Robert said. “That’s what I wanted for you. That’s what you wanted.”

“Yeah, well.” Aaron hunches over again, shaking his head. Everything hurts. “Not without you. I got close, but I always made excuses, always putting it off. It just didn’t feel right with anyone else.”

“I robbed you of that,” Robert says.

Aaron can say nothing. It’s only half true.

“I still think about our kid,” Robert says. “If things had been different, if things had worked out with a surrogate. I think about all the things we would have done with them. How old they’d be now…”

“Don’t,” Aaron says, the word coming out of him with violence. “Don’t do that.”

“I’m sorry.”

Aaron stands up sharply. Even the woman in the playground looks up.

“You’ve got a nerve. Saying you didn’t want to fuck me up and then doing this. Do you have any idea what it took to get over you? Us?”

“Sit down,” Robert tries.

“No!” Wild tears stream from his eyes. “You broke me. You broke us.”

“So you still hate me then.”

“My whole life was gone.”

“What? And mine wasn’t?”

“You made that choice for the both of us. We could’ve tried at least.”

“You know it would never have worked.”

“Well something was better than nothing. You left me with nothing.”

“I had to.”

Aaron wipes the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes. “Look-“

Robert stands up. He knows better than to try and touch him. Aaron realises how long its been since they had any physical contact. Half a lifetime. But he can’t bear it. If he holds him, he’ll never be able to let go.

“No, don’t do this. Don’t shut down and lock me out. Not now.”

“Robert, I can’t.” Aaron starts walking away.

Robert chases after him, until his voice makes Aaron stop. “I’ll give you time. Space! Whatever you need.”

Aaron doesn’t even turn back around. He knows it would be fatal. “I can’t,” he says, one final time, hating himself for being the one to walk away again.

*

Two months pass and having no one to tell about Robert walking back into his life, no one that wouldn’t pass judgement, Aaron feels wretched. He can hardly focus knowing his contact sits in his phone, that he’d only have to tap Robert on the shoulder for him to drop everything. Aaron knew he hadn’t been fair on him. Robert had lost just as much as him, as well as his freedom. Aaron’s choice to fuck up his own life was as much his own fault as he accused Robert of. It wasn’t Robert’s fault that Aaron hadn’t been able to get over him. Aaron did that by himself, unable to admit to his problems, the fact that above everything else, he just wanted Robert back.

So at the end of June, Aaron sends him a text in the middle of the night.

_I don’t want to do this. I want to see you._

The next morning when Aaron checks his phone Robert has replied.

_Today? Please._

He sends him the address of his new office the other side of the city, a smaller sister site which is still a building site. When he arrives Robert’s in a hard-hat and touches him above the elbow so briefly but it still makes Aaron shiver.

“Nice hat,” Aaron says when he arrives to break the tension.

“Thanks,” Robert says and tosses him one. “I got us the matching set.”

Aaron looks down at it before donning it reluctantly, realising it’s compulsory. It was a weird invitation, to come and see Robert’s half-finished new office, all dust sheets and the sound of drilling, but one look at him and Aaron knew why. He wanted Aaron’s approval, for him to admire something he was proud of. He gives Aaron the guided tour, shows him mock-ups of how it’ll look when it’s finished, what each office is for and how many workers he hopes to be able to employ.

“I’m trying to recruit people who have just left prison,” he says, unable to meet Aaron’s eye. “Some people deserve another chance.”

“It’s a nice idea,” Aaron says, pacing away from him. They’re on the second floor where the view is nothing breath-taking, but enough for Aaron to drift away a little. They’re alone, the smell of wood shavings in the air.

“I don’t know where I’d be now if it wasn’t for someone giving me a job when I got out.”

Aaron turns to face him, side on. The sunlight comes through the window in beams, casting across Robert’s face, his shirt. “I know you’re seeing a therapist and that, but if you ever want to tell me. Anything.”

“I don’t want to look at you and see those times instead.”

“Robert…”

“I escaped the worst of it,” Robert says. “I took the odd beating, smack to the mouth for being smart. But nothing like what you went through.”

“You still have nightmares.”

He nods. “Who doesn’t? They don’t go away. That loneliness, that feeling of always being on guard, watching what you say. Who you look at. Especially when they know you like blokes.”

Aaron meets him with sad, broken eyes.

“Nothing happened,” Robert says, trying to shake Aaron out of that idea. “I’d spent half my life hiding who I am, I couldn’t hide it again. Not even in there. I couldn’t do it. I owed it to you.”

Aaron shakes his head. “No. You did it for you. And that was the bravest thing you could’ve done.”

“I’m only brave because of you,” Robert says, edging closer until there’s so little space between them and Robert’s hand hovers over Aaron’s shoulder.

In a single, sharp breath, Aaron’s arms are around him, pulling him close, chest to chest, heartbeats blurring to one, their plastic hats knocking together. Everything Robert is in that moment, his heat, his smell, the texture of him under Aaron’s hands, he’s all he ever was.

“God I-” Robert says, breathing into Aaron’s neck, hands running up his spine. Aaron’s throat croaks, a small yelp of a cry and then he musters the sense to ease Robert back, for them to compose themselves just as a whistling builder appears from behind a dust sheet.

Aaron roughly wipes his eyes, watching the builder and then with a raise of his forehead says to Robert, “And did you choose this construction crew strictly on skill?”

“I don’t know,” Robert says, turning to look at the guy who wouldn’t be out of place on a movie-set. “They make me feel a bit old and out of shape. But I could put a good word in for you.”

Aaron laughs, thankful for the teasing, for the way Robert’s touch resumes, a light hand tapping his back as Robert wants to move him on to look at another floorplan.

*

Aaron feels a little flutter in his chest when Robert tells the workmen they can have the rest of the afternoon off, paid, even though he’s already grumbled to Aaron that the project is overrunning. Aaron knows it’s for his benefit.

“Are you hungry?” he asks and somehow they end up sitting in the half-built office, pizza and beer delivered and sat between them on the wooden flooring, the summer sun still streaming in.

The time comes where Aaron gives himself permission to get Robert up to speed on those closest to him, Liv, Chas and Paddy, Eve, other Dingles who didn’t get a mention last time. He explains about Uncle Zak’s death which lead to him buying a small chain of garages and then has to laugh it off and roll his eyes when Robert reminds him that was one of the lies Faith once told when trying to big them up in front of Natalie.

They’ve shed their hats by now – totally against health and safety – and Robert’s kneeling to reach over for more beers. Robert’s shirt is untucked, hair roughed up from where he put his hands through it, too vain to endure the flattened hat-hair.

Robert cracks open the lids of two more beer, they clink them together and gulp until breathless, the labels wet and peeling from condensation. Robert presses the cold bottle against his forehead.

“So,” he says. “You’ve done a good job avoiding telling me about your life.”

Aaron shrugs. “I’ve told you about work. You’ve seen the main garage.”

“A house? A dog? Someone you sleep with?” Robert’s eyes are an electric colour when they look at him and Aaron remembers what they look like in the dark, when he’s hungry to be touched.

“A nice flat. No dog at the moment.”

Robert stares him out until Aaron can feel he’s blushing. Ridiculous, a man in his forties reduced to being coy. He can feel his body reacting in ways he doesn’t want. He throws a pizza crust back into the box and closes the lid, unsure if this is a signal he’s leaving or not. He doesn’t move.

“What about you?” Aaron says.

“No dog,” Robert replies, the smile curling and torturous.

“I meant-”

Robert puts the bottle to his mouth and the head of it presses against his bottom lip until it’s wet and fat. Then he hesitates, puts the bottle on the ground and rises onto his knees again. It looks as if he’s leaning to reach something but when Aaron focuses, pays attention, Robert is close, breathing down on him. Aaron’s eyes latch onto the fastening of Robert’s jeans and then dart upwards to his face, to the hand Robert puts in his shoulder, thumb circling a sweet spot by his throat. Both of them have sluggish breath now, the air heavy with the smell of beer and saw-dust and neither of them really moving. Aaron rubs his hand over his own knee shakily, a substitution, not knowing what to do, as if he’s lost all sense of himself. 

Robert’s deft fingers undo the first button on Aaron’s shirt and touch the pale skin underneath. _Don’t_ , Aaron wants to say, but can’t, body hanging over a precipice. Robert runs the tips of his fingernails along the shaved hairline at the back of Aaron’s neck and he coils, shudders. Aaron puts his hand on Robert’s waist, leaving damp marks from where his hand has been holding the beer. He tilts his head up as Robert lowers his, breath meeting in the middle.

Aaron shuts his eyes.

“What are we doing?” he says. There’s not confusion in his voice but accusation, like they’re breaking rules.

Aaron half-heartedly turns his face away, only for Robert to put his hand on Aaron’s cheek, to paw his attention back.

Aaron’s hand is half pushing him away, half against his firm chest. He wants to put his mouth there and pretend that’s all this is, physical, two bodies, need. He lets his head fall down, out of Robert’s touch.

Robert withdraws a little, leaving a space between them, resting back on his haunches. It’s like he realises too, how painful it is to open old wounds. The past has become another planet, and yet the suffering is so familiar, too near to revisit without care.

Robert clears his throat and there’s distance again, guilt, an edge of regret. He returns to his place, the opposite side of the pizza boxes.

“I don’t want you gone from my life,” Robert says, not looking at him.

“Robert…”

“Friends,” he says all too quickly. “We managed it once.”

“Barely.”

“So what do you want? A clean break? For us to pretend we never knew each other?”

“No,” Aaron says firmly. “No, of course I don’t.” It would be easy to ask him to leave her, this girlfriend of no importance, but it’s what after that would break them.

“Then let’s just try.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final part. Aaron and Robert spend a summer being friends but Aaron finds it increasingly hard to contain his feelings and at the opening party of Robert's new office, Aaron confesses that the ambitious, older Robert standing before him is the one he's still in love with.

For the summer they are friends. Texting. Meeting up in a pub to watch football, to be alongside sweaty straight men so that even the thought of touching each other is alien, impossible. Aaron accepts Robert’s invitation to use Robert’s gym membership as a guest, but it only happens once and it’s a mistake. He has to make excuses not to shower there and head home instead, knowing he’s half-hard watching Robert rise from the pool, the wet cling of his swim shorts, his body so toned from a new fitness regime. How is it that he’s got a fitter body now than all those years ago? He fantasises about cornering him in the showers and fucking him when he’s still wet and tastes of chlorine.

Twice Aaron heads over to Robert’s office after work to meet him with a coffee and a walk, making excuses to leave before dinner is inevitable and the bleed of a sunset would make things awkward. Robert comes to the garage and buys coffee again for everyone, making Elsie ask who the silver fox is and forcing Aaron to later admit that Robert is his first husband. He’s aware he purposefully doesn’t say ‘ex’. It goes briefly quiet when Robert’s second office gets up and running, but he texts Aaron photos and then calls him to enthuse and Aaron can almost feel his glow through the phone and it makes him grin from ear to ear.

Aaron makes himself ask after Jules. Curiosity picks away at him. They’ve been together months now, and it’s obvious to Aaron that despite Robert’s claims that it isn’t serious, he likes her and she can see wedding bells. Sometimes he tortures himself imagining their domestic life together. Him ironing while she reads from her phone in the kitchen, them making dinner together, sharing a bath, a bed.

Aaron makes himself go on a date just so he has some retaliation, even though thinking of it in those terms feels ridiculous and petty. He tells Robert about it to make a point, to test the waters and Robert, pretending to be an interested mate, asks for details, to see a photo. _Nice. Looks more my type than yours_ , is all Robert says and Aaron fights an urge to say something more that would make him jealous.

 _Does Jules know you’re bi?_ Aaron texts.

_Sort of._

_?_

It takes a while for Robert to flesh out his reply.

_She didn’t want to go into details about ex’s. She’s been divorced twice. Snap. But when we first met I did tell her that I like men too. Don’t think she understands it. I think she thinks it’s in the past so it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t count anymore._

Aaron hesitates, fighting the twinge of jealousy and types: _When was the last time you were with a bloke?_

 _Just after I got out._ Robert types more, but the dots disappear.

_Does she know about me?_

_No._ And Robert doesn’t clarify whether he means what they are now, or what they were then.

There’s that frisson of electricity again. If they are just friends why hasn’t he told her? And deep in the root of Aaron’s heart he still feels that possessiveness, that ownership of him, that why should anyone else need to know what they are?

*

In late August Aaron has sex with the guy from the date. It’s good and for a minute or two, it’s clearing. But then when Aaron falls asleep he dreams of Robert, in a dream so vivid it makes his body feel as if it’s a memory. He wakes up and is strangely relieved to find his bed empty, date gone. He shuts his eyes and groans at how tense his body feels. He runs a shower and jerks off, leaning against the glass door and imagining Robert’s lathered hands holding onto his hips, tongue against his neck. He misses him, his body. There’s never been anyone since who’s quite understood his rhythm, how he likes to be touched.

He feels guilty afterwards, like he’s crossed a line, but he couldn’t help himself.

Aaron goes back into the bedroom and picks up his phone, considering texting Robert something he’d regret. But when he checks it there’s already a message waiting for him.

Robert invites Aaron to the party celebrating the opening of his new office and the second Aaron agrees to go, he gets get a dizzy feeling in his gut.

 _I was convinced you’d say no,_ Robert replies.

 _For you,_ Aaron texts, knowing there is heat in those two words.

He buys new aftershave, a new shirt. Since the new year he’s been working out and when he looks in a mirror there’s a spark of feeling, knowing he looks good, looks younger than he should.

When he arrives his confidence is dented by the money on show, the real and Botoxed youth, the expensive looking suits. He considers bolting before Robert spots him but he doesn’t get the chance, an arm snakes around his shoulders and draws him in.

“I’m so glad you came,” he says. Robert’s face has the look of a happy man who’s already drunk too much.

Aaron smiles tightly and manages to crawl out from under his arm. Face to face again everything feels like a bad idea. Aaron’s pulse makes him light-headed. It was easier when the idea of Robert was just a forbidden fantasy. Now he’s there, dressed in a way that makes Aaron’s insides ache, an energy that is impossible not to be drawn into. He smells so good. Aaron just clenches.

“Thank you,” Robert says, his sincerity seeming to instantly sober him. “You know I hate these corporate things.”

“Are you joking? You’re in your element.”

“It’s all front,” he says, taking another drink from his glass of fizz to prove his point. He’s suddenly smaller looking, sheepish to glance around and see all these people gathered. “What are you having? The good stuff?“

“Yeah, fine,” Aaron says, cutting him off. He still feels awkward about the dream. He doesn’t need any reminders of times they shared naked in bed, champagne dripping from their mouths.

Robert swipes a flute from a table and then stands back taking a look at him. It’s as though he can feel Robert’s breath on the back of his neck, hair’s rising. “I really am glad you’re here,” he says.

“You’ve got a lot to be proud of.” Aaron looks around. Important people everywhere, all here for Robert. Any kind of resentment he had at Robert’s success, his rise from the lowest time of his life, disappears. He deserves it.

“Do I?” Robert says, his eyes, fixed solely on Aaron, becoming glassy with tears. Aaron can sense what he wants to say, that there’s an emptiness to it all that no amount of congratulations can fill.

It’s then a man interrupts, and Robert’s mask comes straight back down, shaking his hand and enthusing about the man’s new start-up he’s heard so much about. Aaron stands there awkwardly, looking into the bubbles of his drink. He’s a sore thumb here among all these business bigwigs. He’s clunky and his clothes are cheap. He’s not part of this world.

His attention sparks back when Robert mentions his name. “Kian, let me introduce you to Aaron Dingle of AD Garages. Aaron, Kian Leary, one of our most loyal clients.”

Aaron shakes Kian’s hand, both of them gently rolling their eyes at Robert’s schmoozing.

“I didn’t know you were getting into motors,” Kian says to Robert.

“Oh no, Aaron doesn’t need my help.”

“I’m here for moral support,” Aaron says, feeling that flutter again when Robert’s hand squeezes his shoulder so openly in front of Kian. In that split second he travels back in time, their sentences slotting together with the ease of people who spent all their time in each other’s pockets. His body instantly pangs with a flush of pride. How good it used to feel to stand by his side, to come as a team, to be Robert’s and introduced as his husband.

Across the room he spots Jules among a circle of women and feels instantly overwhelmed, suffocated. He’s a fraud, all of his feelings are. He’s playing a role that doesn’t belong to him anymore. Aaron excuses himself, avoiding eye contact as he slides away and ignoring the way Robert looks after him as Aaron heads off into the throng of the party to find a distraction – a drink or food or just somewhere to hide. He almost wishes he’d brought someone with him to use as a shield.

After hiding away in the toilets for a little while, washing his hands until the skin around his knuckles feel raw and scratchable, he comes out and finds himself in a narrow corridor passing Jules and it’s impossible to sneak away. She smiles at him politely, no recognition in her eyes and Aaron breathes a sigh of relief, but then she calls out, turning back.

“Excuse me?”

Aaron stops, smiles at her, lips gripped together.

“Oh it is you,” she says. “Outside Robert’s office in the spring. Do you remember?” She holds out her hand. “Jules. I’m Robert’s partner.”

“Aaron.”

She flips her hair back across her shoulder and with it comes a wave of expensive perfume. “It was so lovely of you to come tonight.”

She’s genuine, warm, and Aaron twists and turns in his guilt. Why now does it feel worse now than when they were having a full blown affair? Now they’re not even doing anything. They’re just friends.

Except there’s nothing ‘just’ about it.

It would be so easy for Robert to break her heart and leave her and yet he hasn’t. Once he would have done, he’d have torn Aaron’s clothes off and dropped her in seconds. But she represents something to him, a new start. Aaron reminds him of his failures, of past pain. Aaron reminds him that he lost everything and had to crawl his way back, that he’d lost his son, his family, his whole life. Aaron reminds him of a life that went wrong, a path he can’t bear to revisit.

“It’s a big night,” Aaron says. “He deserves it.”

Jules leans against the wall casually like they’re about to start a lengthy chat and the sight of it turns Aaron rigid, just when he wants to run.

“You know about his past? What he’s overcome?” she says with a hushed sort of tenderness. She admires him. She loves him. It’s Robert, how can she not? Aaron was head over heels far sooner than he liked to admit.

Aaron nods. His throat feels dry again.

“Was he always like this?” she asks. “You’ve known him a long time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Determined, ambitious.”

Aaron can’t help himself. He grins, feeling something in his chest open up. “That’s Robert. He gets a look in his eyes and that’s it.”

She seems to think on this assessment for a moment and then looks at Aaron in a way he can’t read. “You know him very well. I’ll have to pick your brain sometime,” she says, not a question, nothing he can say anything back to in response. It’s as though she knows, even if she doesn’t suspect a thing.

*

He should leave. A part of him even wants to, but the rest of him is tethered there. With Robert back in his life it’s impossible not to feel like he has to soak up every second in case it gets snatched away from him again. Aaron hangs around on the side-lines, wandering from office to office to look at the architecture, to imagine what this building will become. He has to take several breaths to steady himself when he feels overwhelmed by what Robert has achieved. The life he’s built without him. The pain of it takes him somewhere dark.

Aaron slips to the bar to hunt down another drink, snippets of conversation floating by him.

“Where’s Robert got to anyway? I wanted to talk to him about one of the new acquisitions.”

“Over by the entrance, isn’t he? Last time I saw him he was speaking to one of the investors.”

“Nope, I already did a scout around.”

“Early exit?”

Aaron’s attention pricks and he finds himself abandoning his drink, glancing around the golden lit glow of the room, stretching up onto his toes. He spots Jules again, but Robert’s nowhere to be seen. Aaron heads up to the first floor, excusing himself as he passes a sheepish pair of twenty-something girls making out in a quiet corner.

“You haven’t seen Robert anywhere, have you?”

One of the girls straightens her skirt, looking to the other shyly. She raises her eyes upwards. “I think he went upstairs.”

The second floor is out of bounds for the party, but Aaron remembers the artist’s interpretation of what the building was meant to look like and he knows exactly where he’ll find Robert. There’s a roof garden. More of a concrete jungle than anything that could resemble a garden, but Robert said he wanted to turn into someone private, an outdoors area for escape. What he missed in prison was time alone, time to think, time to breathe. He didn’t want his employees to have to stare at four walls every hour of the day.

The fire-door leading to the roof is open and through it comes a moonlit rush of cool air. Aaron climbs the staircase, slowing when he reached the top and sees Robert, back to him, standing in silhouette, staring out at the night.

Aaron doesn’t know what to say. He can hear the thrum of the party carrying on downstairs undeterred. No one has tried that hard to look for him. Robert must hear him approach but doesn’t move, doesn’t speak a word. Aaron stands by his side, not looking at him sideways on as if that might break the spell. Up there on the roof feels like another world to the event carrying on downstairs.

“Nice night for it,” Aaron says, keeping his eyes out to the horizon. He’s always been a bit funny about heights, but if he knows if he glances down the streets will be dotted with light from residential buildings, street-lamps, traffic winding their way home. There’s always something calming about standing in the dark watching sleep crawl over a town.

Robert doesn’t reply and for a second Aaron almost thinks he hasn’t heard, but he knows him better than that.

“What are you doing on your own up here?”

“Needed a breather,” Robert says and exhales to prove his point. “You? Fed up of the corporate chat?”

“I came to find you.”

There are long silences between them and even in the dark chill, Aaron knows his skin is warm, his stomach unnerved with more than just the artificial adrenaline of the drink. Standing there like this with the stars out, alone, is surely breaking one of their rules as friends. Aaron has the familiar pull of the past. They’re hardly any distance up and yet the air feels thinner, Robert feels closer.

“I’m supposed to be going over my speech,” Robert says. He still hasn’t moved, hasn’t looked at Aaron and the way he speaks as if Aaron’s one of the catering stuff, interrupting him with a drink.

“Oh.” Aaron hesitates. “Right, well. I just wanted to see if you were okay. I’ll leave you to it then.”

He turns, but just as he does, Robert’s hand catches the sleeve of his jacket. Aaron stops in his tracks, his back to Robert still. Robert’s fingers enclose Aaron’s wrist and holds him there.

“No,” he says. “Don’t go yet.”

Aaron turns back his head, gaze travelling from the solemn expression on Robert’s face to the place where he is held in Robert’s possession. There’s almost contact, skin to skin, it’s almost as if they are holding hands. Aaron stretches his fingers until they can slip under the cuff of Robert’s shirt sleeves, until he can feel his warm, thrumming skin. There was a time where he thought he might never get to touch Robert again, where that reality ruined the rest of his years. Bloke after bloke and he was always searching for something more, something to cover up the emptiness he felt, knowing it would never make him whole.

“I’m so proud of you, you know,” Aaron says. The words are more instinctive than something consciously coming from his mouth. These are the things he’s wanted to say all night. “You’ve achieved so much. And when I–” Aaron’s voice breaks. “When I look at you now, everything you’ve managed to do… I just see the bloke from back then. The arrogant… cocky… ambitious… the man I fell in love with. I still…”

Aaron hears a tremble of breath from Robert’s throat and then everything stops. Aaron throws his weight against Robert, arms around him, chest to chest, arms holding onto dear life. An embrace that feels like relief more than anything else. Then Aaron kisses him, so hard and desperate it’s like they’re trying to absorb each other through the skin. Aaron holds onto him, kissing him like he’ll never let go, fingers running into his hair, hand tugging at his waist to bring their bodies impossibly closer. Huffs of air and breathy grunts and all the need of eighteen-plus years apart.

Robert pulls away.

And Aaron is winded, met with a cold block of air. Robert takes a step back, eyes looking at the space around Aaron’s body, not at him. Dread seeps into Aaron’s bloodstream like poison. He can feel it creeping through him muscle by muscle. Something’s wrong. He looks down off the side of the building, heights no longer a fear.

Robert shakes his head, a deep-set frown making him unrecognisable. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t do this.” He’s shaking, trying to neaten his clothes, looking towards the steps that lead up to the garden. He pushes past Aaron. “It’s not right. Too much has changed.”

Aaron stares at him open mouthed, his body still reeling from the physical pleasure of the kiss, the way it had felt like coming home. Now a door had been slammed in his face, the place where he stood unrecognisable, Robert a stranger. None of it makes sense. He staggers from foot to foot trying to make sense of it, waiting for it all to be a trick, a dream.

“What’s changed?”

Robert lowers his head, rushing towards the steps, to the doorway leading from the rooftop down. “I’ve got a speech to make. I’m sorry.”

*

At home, Aaron sits with a pile of photos in his hands, trembling. One by one, not even daring to look down at the history he tears into, Aaron rips the photos into shreds. Christmas. Birthdays. Days out. Selfies. Their weddings. Honeymoon. Holidays. A weekend in Wales. A trip to Manchester. A fancy restaurant. Robert laughing. Robert kissing him. Robert’s arms around his neck. Slung around his shoulders. Robert in a novelty jumper. Both of them pink with sunburn. Truth is, Aaron doesn’t need to look at the photos as he rips them into pieces. He knows these moments, these snapshots, off by heart. He lived them, he cherished them.

And now he’s done what he should have done years ago. Now he knows exactly where he went wrong, why everything was a failure, why his therapist, his family and every ex he ever had wanted him to do this, exorcise Robert out of his life. He should have gutted Robert from his life years ago. Now what’s he got to show for it? Loneliness? Misery? All for what?

Aaron throws the fragments of photographs across the room, screaming and sobbing until he feels sick and has to muffle his cries against his pillow.

As he falls into a restless sleep, berating himself for ever believing he could get his life back, that Robert was his life and he wanted the same thing, he hears flickers of Robert’s speech from earlier that night. Aaron had stayed on the rooftop hearing the microphone feedback and then finally Robert deliver his words.

What did he hear?

Robert talking about fresh starts. Opportunity. The chance to build a better future, to learn from past mistakes. To grow, to change.

And what Aaron heard, underneath all this, was that Robert had changed and didn’t love him anymore.

*

He wakes with a start, dreaming that he’s falling, stirring to a body that feels hungover, puffy face, sore eyes. He checks his phone to find it’s gone three and then hears again the real reason he woke up, the intercom buzzing sounding, a bashing against the entrance door. The occupants of the downstairs flat are away and it’s a good thing – someone would be calling the police with that noise. Aaron knows he can’t ignore it even though he lays there in bed, still dressed from the party, considering whether he could just close his eyes and wait for Robert to give up.

Aaron’s got no choice. He stumbles across the apartment, down the stairs and opens up the main door. Robert’s finger is held on the buzzer so it makes a continuous sound. He’s soaking wet, a fine rain in the air still, but it’s clear Robert’s been out in it some time.

“Get in your car and fuck off home,” Aaron says. “I don’t want to see you.”

“Aaron, please –”

“No.”

“Let me come in at least.” He indicates to the sad state of him, suit crumpled, hair ruffled and dripping.

“No,” Aaron says, then cruelly, “I’ve got a guy upstairs.”

“He can’t be that good if you’re still dressed.” Robert sticks out his hand, pushing on the door so it forces open, backing Aaron out of the way. He edges back and Robert thrusts half his body in the doorway.

“Get out! How did you find me here anyway?”

“I did some digging.” Robert looks up and around at the apartment building. “Aren’t you going to wake the neighbours shouting and screaming like that?”

“They’re away.”

With Aaron blocking the doorway, Robert takes a seat on the porch step, folding his arms across his chest.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting until you’ve calmed down enough to talk.”

“I’ve told you to go.”

“You look like shit. You’ve been crying.”

Aaron scoffs. “I don’t need your pity. You’ve already humiliated me once already tonight. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you let me explain.”

“Then you’ll be sitting on the step all night. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Fine.”

Robert draws his knees up to his chest, putting his arms around them, settling in as if he intends to stay for hours. He’s silent, staring ahead, and Aaron knows the intention behind it is to drive him fucking mad. And it does. He pushes out of the door and stands in front of Robert, the slight rain only just bothering him, and stares him down.

“Go on, then. Talk. For all the good it does.”

Robert looks him over warily, as if this is some kind of trap. “The day I got out was one of the worst days of my life,” he says.

Aaron just frowns, sharping in his disbelief.

“Because when you’re inside, time seems to stand still. You know it doesn’t, you know life is carrying on without you. But you can kid yourself. You avoid looking in the mirror, looking at the date. And when it comes to night time you can close your eyes and imagine the world as you left it, just waiting for you to come back into it. And that’s what I did. I thought about you frozen in time, coming down our stairs to me, the kitchen dark and lit in blue from my laptop screen. You in your soft joggers trying to coax me away from work into bed. I could replay it over and over, holding onto it like one day I’d slip back into that life.

“But, on the day I was released, I knew it was all over. I’d have to see my age, the world changed. I’d have to face up to the fact you were miles away living out your own life without me and we’d never get it back again.”

Robert looks at Aaron right in the eyes.

“I looked you up and I knew that was the end. You hadn’t waited. You weren’t waiting. You’d lived, just like I told you to.”

Aaron’s throat gives a strangled noise before he’s able to talk. “What aren’t you getting about this? I didn’t live,” he says. “I just carried on. I didn’t have a choice.”

“I know.” Robert glances at Aaron, imploringly. “But that was better than what it would have been, right? I made the right choice. Better than watching prison destroy what we had.”

“There were moments,” Aaron says, trying to right himself, trying to be strong. “I’ve been happy. I’ve been in love. I’ve gone days where I didn’t even think about you. Where it was easier with you gone.”

“Good.” Robert looks down and Aaron knows by the thickness of his voice that he’s trying not to cry. “Then I did the right thing. That’s what I wanted for you.”

Aaron looks straight at Robert, and then away again, struggling to get the words out. “It’s never been enough.”

From the corner of his vision, Aaron sees Robert’s legs straighten, come down from under his chin. He looks less like a boy, and more his age, a damaged man in his fifties, fourteen years of his life wasted in prison. Robert looks down the street and then at the driveway. It’s a nice area, a spacious apartment, a modern block. Aaron likes it here, but he knows what it says – single, alone. Stuck in an era of being a young man with his whole life ahead of him.

“You make good money from the garages,” Robert says. “So why here? Why haven’t you got a nice house somewhere, a garden?”

“What for?” Aaron says, feeling his throat tighten. “I had a family house, a garden. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be when you don’t have a family to fill it.”

“I loved Mill,” Robert says.

“I loved you.”

A dog yaps down the road and a security light briefly blinks on and off.

“Loved?” Robert asks.

Aaron sneers. “You’ve got a nerve. I heard you tonight, your speech. Everything you said about the future, change, leaving the past behind.”

“I didn’t mean you!”

“You made your feelings pretty clear.”

Robert stands up so that the two of them are on equal footing, eye to eye. “I wasn’t expecting it. We said we were going to be friends. You didn’t want me, you didn’t trust me. _I_ don’t trust me! It’s too painful. The thought of hurting you again, losing you… it broke us both.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Jules asked me to marry her,” Robert says.

“Oh. Right. Right.” Aaron nods, shaking tears right out of his eyes. Everything stings. He can’t think of anything else to say, his head moves as if he has no control.

Robert puts his hands out to touch Aaron on the shoulders, but Aaron backs off, arms up like shields. “So that’s what this is. New business, new wife. You’ve got it all worked out. Well done. Congratulations, I’m very happy for you.”

Robert takes a step back, frowning in a way that deepens the permanent lines on his forehead. “It’s nothing like that. I said no. I finished with her. What did you think…?”

“You were with her for months. You must have told her you were in love with her!”

“No!” Robert says. “We never had those conversations. And if we had I’d have never given her the impression I wanted to get married. Never.”

“It must have been serious to her.”

“Not to me,” he says. “I should’ve ended it months ago and I was stupid and cowardly and I didn’t. I was scared of being on my own, scared that I might make things awkward for us when you’d made it clear you didn’t want me. She knew I’d lost interest, thrown myself into work. She said as much herself, said proposing was her last-ditch attempt to keep my attention.”

“That’s not a reason to stay with someone.”

“I know.”

“You sound like a dickhead,” Aaron says.

“We’ve already established I’m not a nice person, but what do you want me to do, drive back over there and tell her I’ve changed my mind? I don’t love her, Aaron. I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I always will.”

“We’re too old for this,” Aaron says, half-turning away from him. They’re half way up the path now, almost standing on the pavement. If it was any other time of night someone could walk past them and have to step around their argument, keeping their head down. “Messing up other people’s lives, and for what? So that you can break my heart all over again?”

Robert edges closer, their shadows becoming one, the dark inescapable. “Forget other people. It’s only you I want. It’s only you I care about. I wasted fifteen years of my life denying who I was and fourteen years in prison. I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want anything else in this whole world except you.”

“You were right before,” Aaron says. “There’s too much hurt. It’s the wrong thing to do.”

“How can it be?”

Aaron closes his eyes just for a second, just to stop the world from its dizzy spin, and when he does, Robert rests his forehead against his, fingers light on his hips.

“I should never have let you go,” Robert says. “It might have felt right and you did deserve better, you always do…”

“Don’t.”

“Aaron…”

There it is, that murmur of his name, awakening something deep inside. Robert must have said his names hundreds of times, but each time it was like a kiss, a call of belonging.

“We wasted time,” Aaron says.

“Don’t say it’s too late,” Robert says, interrupting. “Please.”

“I don’t want to go over our regrets,” Aaron says, closing his eyes against him. “I don’t blame you for any of it, I just wish we hadn’t had our time cut short.”

Robert pulls back slightly and overhead the rain is heavier than before. Aaron can’t tell whether what’s on his own cheeks are tears or rainwater, all he knows is that in the moonlight, the rain looks silver, glittering on the road.

“What are you saying?” Robert asks.

“I love you too.”

And Aaron presses in, forehead to forehead again, a heavy sigh so big it shudders through Robert, before Aaron is kissing him, pulling him closer by his shirt, going translucent in the rain. Kissing him, open mouthed and slow, with the exhaustion of a painful past they can’t forget, but with the anticipation of endless days ahead to heal the parts of themselves they thought were damaged for good. The kiss is heat against the cold, physical and hungry, but so much more, it’s Robert’s body becoming Aaron’s again, Aaron cherishing what it feels like to be himself again, in Robert’s arms.

When they part, smiling, breathless, wet from the rain. Robert gives him a smile, the intent of which is plain. Aaron places his hand flat on Robert’s chest, thumb circling his nipple through the damp of his shirt.

“Now you can come inside,” he says.

*

Aaron’s first up the stairs and into the flat, but it’s only when he steps in through the door that he sees it through Robert’s eyes. The place is soulless. There’s nothing of him in it, no heart, no history. The walls are bare, the furnishings are functional, mismatched. He’s lived like a man in waiting, incoherent, unfinished.

They kiss their way clumsily into the bedroom, removing damp clothes, revealing clammy skin. The texture of their skin is different, worn, drier, and yet discovering the differences to Robert’s body with his hands is all part of Aaron’s pleasure. Robert’s mouth is hot on Aaron’s neck, hands busy fumbling with his belt, as he pulls back, slightly sheepish.

“It’s been a while,” he says, meaning since they’ve seen each other naked, since Robert has been with another man.

“If you’ve lost your touch,” Aaron says, pulling Robert’s shirt from his shoulders and breaking up his speech by kissing his way along Robert’s collarbone, “at least I’ve still got my memories.”

Robert scoffs at his cheeky remark, eyes holding an expression that says he’ll take it as a challenge to outdo himself aged 32. Then something changes in him, glancing at the bedroom, the confetti of shredded photos on the floor, on the bed.

“What happened?”

“I was angry. I wanted to get rid of you.”

Robert separates himself for a minute, finding a fragment of their past on the carpet. He holds it up so Aaron can see. “I liked this one.”

“I’ll get another copy.” Aaron shrugs.

A brief moment of doubt crosses Robert’s features. “You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

Aaron takes a step closer and puts his arms around Robert, tucking his head against his chest. How he’s missed this body, the same body despite its differences, the way it doesn’t allow them to pretend no time has passed. Inside, Robert’s heart still beats the same.

“I love you,” Aaron says, his hand coming up to cover the thudding of Robert’s heart. “Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

The rest, isn’t hurried, isn’t rushed. Sometimes, they decide unspoken, they can afford to take their time. There’s no pressing feeling that they’re on borrowed time, that what they have will be stolen. The worst has already happened and this is something to savour.

There’s a softness now to Robert’s skin, when Aaron puts his mouth on him, that makes him ache. But the way Robert handles him is with the same confidence as it ever was, there’s no hesitation, no doubt. What they want, what they feel, doesn’t need to be said. Robert pins Aaron’s wrist against the pillows with one hand and kisses the groans right out of his mouth, hips miming their intention in a way that has Aaron spiralling. Just a graze of contact where he needs it most. It becomes too much for Aaron to endure and he squeezes his legs around Robert’s back, heel against Robert’s arse until he relents, pulling back to study him instead. Aaron doesn’t need to tell Robert to kiss him behind his ear, below his navel, where his thighs splay, because Robert knows and does it, stroking over him like a book, remembering exactly where he left off. He doesn’t comment on new scars, but Aaron knows they’ll talk about it another time, just like the rest of the damage he left in Robert’s wake, the life he couldn’t lead.

Instead Robert kisses the faint line along his arm, the one that signals the first time Robert almost lost him and lays his head on Aaron’s chest with a tenderness that has Aaron threading his fingers through the back of Robert’s hair.

“How did I ever think we could live without each other?” Robert says.

Aaron puts a finger to his lips to shut him up. “Not now,” he says. “Don’t get all sad on me now.”

Aaron shifts and sighs, neck arched, when Robert’s thumb enters him first, deft and slick, Robert’s other hand working the base of his cock. Aaron has to shut down a part of his brain, the part of him that might cry, overwhelmed with it all, the part of him that thought he might never get this again. The part of him that wanted to come just at the sight of Robert’s cock so hard against his stomach. Robert plays and stretches him, a teasing roll of pace change, swapping thumb for fingers, fingers for the head of his cock. Aaron has to suck air from his teeth, thumps the wall with his fist, slips his own hand between his legs to rub himself off. Robert slaps him away, the pair of them eagerly wet with pre-come, hips pushing together, then pulling apart until finally – fuck – finally, Robert pushes into him and the world shuts down to that singular moment, that singular bed. Aaron throws back his head, Robert’s hands clawing into him, both clinging to that sweet spot he hits over and over again.

For the first time in a long time Aaron has everything. His life back. His world.

*

The next week on his way to the garage, Aaron makes a call to Seb. He’s already had difficult conversations with his family, telling them in no uncertain terms that it was none of their business what he did in his life. They protested, having been there to pick up the pieces often enough but Aaron wasn’t prepared to discuss it.

“If you’re not happy for me, for the both of us, I couldn’t give a shit. I don’t want to know.”

They’d been reunited all of three days before Aaron suggested they get married again. In bed, Robert half asleep, arm thrown over his face. There wasn’t even a discussion about things moving too fast, they’d never managed slow and no there was no time, no need to delay it.

“Am I dreaming or did you just offer to get down on your knees?”

Aaron thwacked him with a pillow for that. “One knee!”

“A proposal?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“Again?”

“Again,” Aaron said. “As many times as you want. Marry me.”

“That’s an offer I can’t refuse.” He leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. “Husband.”

Liv was the only family member he trusted with their plans to get married. She’d been the least surprised to hear of their reunion. Aaron could almost hear her shrugging down the phone.

“I thought it was only a matter of time,” she said. “You can’t live without him. You made that obvious enough with your string of perfect guys you couldn’t stand to be with longer than a few years.”

“Oi!”

“What? It’s true. It was always Robert,” she said.

When he told her about the wedding, he explained how they were just doing it down the registry office, no family, no friends.

“I don’t think anyone needs to see you get married for the third time,” she said.

“I don’t think anyone wants to.”

“It’s gonna be weird,” she said. “Seeing his ugly mug again. Brother in law. Again.”

“We’re not in any rush to have a big family reunion.”

“Just the marriage,” she said.

“Everyone hates his guts still,” Aaron said.

“No, they hated losing him. And seeing what it did to you,” Liv said. “He was family and then he was gone. It hurt.”

“I know.”

Aaron puts the call to Seb on Bluetooth and hears him come through the car speakers. It’s been a while since they’ve been in touch. It’s just nice to hear from him, Aaron knows too much time has passed for them to have the relationship they should have had, but for Aaron, it’s a comfort to know Seb’s happy keeping in contact.

“Oh, hi,” Seb says, a lilt of surprise in his voice. “Aaron.”

“How are you?”

“Yeah, alright. Getting ready to go back to uni. I’ve been away. Travelling.”

“Oh yeah? Where abouts?”

“Me and a few mates went camping in France.”

“Nice.”

“Mum and Dad thought I was crazy. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to just get a hotel. Or be like a normal lad my age and go to Ibiza or somewhere like that. Not my scene.”

“Yeah I’m with them on that one, mate. Ibiza used to be the dream.”

Seb laughs and Aaron grins at the speaker, touched by the warmth in Seb’s tone of voice.

“What about Robert?” Seb asks.

“Ibiza was his ideal of hell, believe me. He’d rather eat his own arm. But, no, he was far too into his luxury hotels to ever be seen dead in a tent. Closest I got him to the great outdoors was a cottage in wet and windy Wales and we did some kayaking thing.”

“I don’t know where I get it from then,” Seb says.

“Maybe it’s all you. Nothing wrong with that.”

“I guess,” he says. There’s an awkward pause on the phone. “So…”

“I know it’s been a while,” Aaron starts.

“It’s alright.”

“I’m not gonna start interfering in your life, but I thought you should know, in case you hear it from anyone else,” Aaron says. “Me and Robert…”

“He already told me,” Seb says, cutting Aaron off.

“Oh, right. That’s awkward.”

“He texts me every now and again, you know? It’s still a bit weird still, but I like hearing about his life, getting to know him. And yeah he told me last week. He sounded really happy.”

“Yeah we both are. We decided to get married again.”

“Oh wow,” he says. “That’s cool. Quick!”

“Yeah well, if you get to know him, you’ll realise Robert doesn’t do things by halves. And we don’t want to waste anymore time.” Aaron pauses as he draws up outside the garage. “Sorry mate, this must be really boring for you.”

“Nah it’s alright,” he says. “It’s nice. You sound happy too.”

“I am. Really happy.”

“It’s nice things worked out,” Seb says.

Aaron’s agreement is bittersweet. In an ideal world he’d suggest to Seb that the three of them meet up, go somewhere for the day, reconnect. In an ideal world they’d still be a family, closer than ever. But Aaron’s trying not to live in the past, trying not to dwell on those lost years. Seb’s not a child anymore and they can’t get that back. He has his own life, his own choices. They’re in touch, they know each other, and at one point in his life he didn’t even think they’d have that. What happens now is up to Seb.

*

Robert found them a swanky boutique hotel for their wedding night and they ordered room service, admiring the shine of their new rings. They were similar in style to their previous wedding rings, scored with lines, but inside this time were their initials side by side. They wore suits, even though it was only the council offices and the pavement outside was sprinkled with both confetti, flowers and burger wrappers. Robert leaned across during the ceremony, before they’d even got to the vows, “You look gorgeous,” he said, prompting a fond “Shut up,” from Aaron and the registrar to grin broadly at them both. The ceremony was quick and informal and yet the joy of hearing they were legally married again was all they needed, as they left hand in hand, thanking the witnesses on the way out.

In the hotel Robert is spread out under the covers like a king, music from the sound system blending softly with the rustle of their resettling breaths. He pulls Aaron on top by the hips, dressed in the soft, snug joggers that he lived in in his twenties and still slobbed in now, with Robert nestling his hand underneath the waistband.

Robert murmurs with satisfaction, fingers splaying against Aaron’s bare backside. Just for comfort, not with any intent he was ready for another round. Those kinds of stamina days were long gone.

“This is where we were always meant to end up,” Robert says. “Whatever happened.”

Aaron leans down and kisses him on the mouth, so content he just wants to freeze the moment in time.

“Are you happy?” Robert asks.

“More than happy.”

And Robert grins into another kiss, knowing he’s the reason. That the two of them there in that moment are the reason. Aaron doesn’t need to feel that discomfort any more, that this feeling will be fleeting, taken from him or somehow incomplete. There isn’t a moment where dread kicks in, there’s no loneliness, no feeling that something is missing. This is his life now and Robert’s there with him, back where he belongs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this has been a real joy, but more than that, your comments are filled with such love and kindness and I couldn't ask for nicer comments. Thank you for reading and commenting and I hope if you enjoyed their reunion that you let me know in the comments!


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